Early last February, two satellites collided above Siberia. A derelict Russian one and an American one, which was part of the Iridium communications network, owned by Motorola and launched in 1997.
It's an easy metaphor to make, so I'll go ahead and make it: It’s notable that a thing which was put into place by our parents when we were growing up (in a time, the late 90's, that felt basically post-historical) and we assumed would be solid and safe and useful forever is now crashing into space trash and raining down on all of us.
We are going to make it through this recession. I'm sure of it. It will be difficult and trying, but we will endure. I think the ones who are going to have the hardest time of it, mentally, are people my age, who were raised in this atmosphere of easy and seemingly limitless optimism. We got the impression that history was finished, the hard parts, anyway. Grown-ups were in the process of eradicating the All of The World’s Problems. As soon as all the grown-ups who were evil died and we took over and everybody started recycling, we'd be set. We'd pretty much have this Earth thing figured out and we could blast full-bore into space and get those hoverboards we were promised. We were making glitter-on-construction-paper pictures of everybody in the world holding hands. As soon as we made enough of them, we could show them to World Leaders and they would go, "Oh okay, we get it now."
It's tough to accept that history continues, that there won't always be enough, that struggle isn't solely the provenance of characters in stirring Oscar-bait movies about grim past events. That sometimes real people have to struggle. Even people with iPhones.
Maybe it's self-centered to say it's just people my age, maybe every generation goes through this and it's just a growing-up thing. Realizing our parents weren't working out the last kinks in order to leave us a pristine and effortless world, that they were actually just doing their best and trying to provide for us while themselves thinking "We thought this was going to get easier, but it isn't, it's just getting harder in different ways." But in this case it seems particularly amplified by how swingin' things seemed at the end of the 90's, compared to how decidedly un-swingin' they seem at the moment, and I don't think that's just my childhood memory, I think pretty much everybody agrees that the problems of that time seem pretty laughable compared to the ones we have now.
This is a line from a book I read a couple months ago ("Prep" by Curtis Sittenfeld) and it applies here: “...I know the world always changes; it just seems like for us it changed kind of fast.”
I'm also not saying we deserve ANY pity. We did things like make "Butterfly" by Crazy Town a hit single. It will be hard and f'd-up for everybody, it's just for us it'll take some extra time to get our heads around it.
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we have so much trash floating around the edge of space its embarising. how many people use beepers any more? hardly anyone but there are the satalites for them floating around. its no suprise that they are coliding. and look at all the debris in the video. thats going to stay up there too. how the hell are we going to clean it?
ReplyDeletewe have trash here and out there when will it stop?
ReplyDeleteeveryone needs to wake up
I never really thought of the useless satellites we had out there...like Bill said the pager satellites...I didn't even know they existed. My job still uses pagers. It drives me nuts. 99% of the time I leave my pager on my desk with the battery dead.
ReplyDeleteI took the time to read your short essay on the changing times through your perspective and what a great and interesting perspective it was. I enjoyed relating to you through each and every line of such poetic words for these economic instabilities. I believe this cycle will continue to dim down upon us like full moons on a strange and sudden but yet common night. These economic recession will hit and then recover, hit and recover infinitely until we have the best economists from the best universities all and together to find a better way, a more exact and structured economy that allows room for equity but room for advancement and pay-offs for hard work. It is a never ending conundrum just as space is still vast and spectacular and free for exploration, although complicated to comprehend through our small, but semi-conscious minds. I believe technology may tie into this aspect because every decade as you mentioned, we have advanced in generations, but also advanced in knowledge of the way our world works, as the cylinders and coils that allow a car to drive, or the wheels and trinkets that allow a clock to tick. And this gaining of knowledge will continue to increase even as we struggle and suffer the worse of occasions in an imperfect society.
ReplyDeleteTwo points: when you say we are going to make it through the recession, it seems a bit pointless to me. Assuming you don’t die (for whatever reason cancer, natural causes, gunshot wound or suicide) of course you are going to make it through. It’s just a matter of how bad off will you be by the time things start getting better. The second point is, assuming we can’t leave all that space junk up there because we will eventually crash into it, what are the options for retrieving it? It is possible that we could bring it back down, tugboat style and maybe it will burn up in the atmosphere? Can we sling shot towards the sun and let the sun destroy it for us?
ReplyDeleteIt was only a matter of time befor two satillites collided. A couple of years ago Japan tried to shoot down one of thier plumiting satillites, and they left space debre orbiting the whole planet. Its only going to get worse.
ReplyDeletewe polut here we polute there we are running out of places to polute
ReplyDeleteWe definitely need to clean up and consolidate our sattelite systems to become a universal system so that they are all on the same page. It will take a major disaster before we do anything about it, one that claims the lives of many people. I guess some things never change, we have to learn the hard way.
ReplyDelete