>Please give it to Google so they can add it to Google Maps.

What do you think "add[ing] it to Google Maps" would accomplish? What makes you think the data analysis is easily crowd-sourced? I.e, what makes you think that analyzing the data requires no special experience or expertise?

>there will be a swarm of autonomous submersible robots doing detailed scans

Why? What would be the economic case for doing this? Building machines that work at the extreme depths of the sea floor is incredibly hard. The search for a single lost airplane (and it really is just the one, not a single other commercial airliner is unaccounted for) certainly isn't going to fund this pipe dream.

> What do you think "add[ing] it to Google Maps" would accomplish?

Give us better publicly-accessible seafloor maps for that bit of ocean?

>> there will be a swarm of autonomous submersible robots doing detailed scans

> Why? What would be the economic case for doing this?

Immediately? Who knows. He did qualify his statement with an "eventually/100 years," though. I can imagine such robots would be useful for environmental monitoring, mineral prospecting, and defense reasons. Especially if the cost decreases.

IIRC, there already are automated scientific buoys that drift with the currents, do programmed dives, and transmit their measurements by satellite.

Edit: here is a link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_glider

Edit2: here is a paper about installing mapping sonar in such a vehicle: http://www.physics.mun.ca/~bdeyoung/Zhou_Icebergs_2014.pdf

>Why?

Gold lost on sunken ships!

yes, that would be incentive enough

In a hundred years I expect the wreckage to be found, even by accident. That's a moot point though, as in a hundred years, the relatives will be no longer alive and noone will care too much.

I disagree. Historians, scientists, engineers, prospectors, etc. will be thinking about this for a LONG time.

Tomnod has been trying this since I think right after the plane went missing: http://www.tomnod.com/campaign/mh370_indian_ocean

The obvious difference being that Tomnod is focused on actual imagery of the surface of the Earth, something that most people are already familiar with thanks to Google Maps et al., and even so AFAIK the project produced many false positives and no actual hits.

I have no idea what format the sonar data is in, but I highly suspect that it is not in the form of familiar imagery in which parts of a commercial airliner would be readily identified by untrained observers.