Oh please, Google Earth, must you ruin the Loch Ness monster for us?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/22/google-earth-loch-ness-monster-mystery-nessie

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So Google Earth, with its all-encompassing panoptic eye, has joined the search for the Loch Ness monster. Is no mystery to be left to us? Technology has gradually deprived us of our dreams – even as it exposed them. From the mid-19th century, spirit photography thrived, partly because no one yet understood the way the science of photography could be manipulated as an art. Mediums producing ectoplasm out of their mouths (and other orifices) were photographed, as were their spirit guides. Implicit faith was placed in these images. Dead husbands, wives, and babies emerged out of cotton-wool clouds.

But at a time when even the prime minister, Gladstone, declared spiritualism to be one of the great new faiths of the age, technology enabled fantasies to be fulfilled. A great writer such as Arthur Conan Doyle could believe that two young children had photographed fairies by a Yorkshire beck. Soldiers facing the terror of the trenches of the western front could see angels in the sky.

Related: Here be monsters | Carole Jahme | Notes & Theories science blog

It is fascinating to see how the scientific developments of the 19th century went hand in hand with what seem, to us, to be extraordinarily credulous reports. Sea serpents were a regular installation in newspaper articles. In 1817, a sea monster was regularly sighted off the New England coast – the shores from which I write – by hundreds of witnesses, including a renowned US senator, Daniel Webster, and by experienced sailors and fishermen. They saw a long-necked, undulating beast.

Boston’s Linnean Society – whose members included the scientist Jacob Bigelow, the man actually credited with inventing the word “technology” – even prepared a serious scientific paper on the phenomenon. Were they all fools, or were they fooled? When Oliver Goldsmith’s animal encyclopaedia, Animated Nature, was reissued in the early 19th century “for the young and tender”, as Herman Melville wrote, its plate depicting Arctic animals – a snarling polar bear, a betusked narwhal, itself a legendary creature – included a sea serpent, as if it were an entirely accepted member of the bestiary.

It was precisely because photography was popularised that the Loch Ness monster achieved its modern place in contemporary mythology. Perhaps we see what we want to believe. The 19th century was also an age of receding faith – “Its melancholy, long withdrawing roar”, in Matthew Arnold’s famous maritime-inflected phrase. As scientists such as Richard Owen discovered real monsters – Owen coined the name dinosaur – and Darwin charted our physical descent from apes, we invented new beasts to deal with this psychic shift. Hence Conan Doyle’s wonderful fantasy The Lost World, which merged paleontology with what would become known as cryptozoology.

The need for some sort of belief blurred the boundaries between reality and imagination. Just as quickly as science disproved our fables, art stepped into the breach, into the vacuum that our nature abhors. Not for nothing did Grimms’ fairytales become so popular in the modern era, or the work of Tolkien and CS Lewis. The darkness at the edge of things, that which lies in the deep forest or profound ocean, will always win out over what is proved to be unreal. We love to believe that the “bloop”, a mysterious sound recorded by scientists off South America in 1997, might be an aquatic monster, perhaps a gigantic squid, a real-life kraken, or a cetacean bigger even than a blue whale.

Just as quickly as science disproved our fables, art stepped into the breach, into the vacuum that our nature abhors

Now that Google has the world all mapped and there are surveillance cameras recording every walking, waking moment of our lives, perhaps we need our fairies and dragons and ghosts more than ever. Hence the popularity of science fiction and fantasy, from Alien to Harry Potter, Doctor Who and Game of Thrones. As the natural world is analysed and even altered irrevocably by our rampant progress, we seem keener than ever to believe in myth, rather than rational science.

In 2000, the Society for Psychical Research reported that since the advent of the mobile phone there had been a steep decline in psychic phenomena, as if all those radio waves had zapped our ethereal other selves. Meanwhile, astrobiologists – a new scientific discipline dedicated to studying alien life, even though it has yet to be discovered – hypothesise that “Goldilocks” planets (not too hot, not too cold) might have watery atmospheres in which giant whales swim, or fly. What’s the difference between their imagining, and ours?