Chronicles of a DEATH Foretold

Whole Earth,  Summer, 2001  by Dave Prager

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Last March, fifty tons of metal screamed across the sky from 137 miles above the Earth. When it was launched in 1986, the Mir space station had an anticipated useful life span of three to five years. Fifteen years, 104 cosmonauts and 2.2 billion orbital miles later, Mir-leaking, dented rattling, and thoroughly infested with fungus--was finally pronounced beyond repair.

The space habitat was heaved from orbit by a Progress cargo vehicle, aimed at a reentry; point northeast of Australia. Eighty tons of the station burned up in reentry; momentum carried the remaining fifty tons thousands of miles southeast, where it fell steaming into a stretch of the Pacific between New Zealand and Chile.

The millennium opens with the Soviet space dream disposed of as planned--with the exception of one piece of red-hot scrap that reportedly scared some sheep in Dagestan. One hundred and fifty tons of cosmic trash, returning like Icarus to the ecosystem.

My roommate is not a cosmonaut, but she owns one of those fashionable-yet-functional shelving units from Ikea. Cut-rate wood shelves, metal hooks, metal rungs. It hangs together wonderfully--gravity being free and reliable in our neighborhood.

But in a few years, a rotating cast of books will take their toll on that Ikea. A few broken hooks or bent rods, and it's dead as Mir. Decay happens. Entropy consumes even the most resilient examples of human ingenuity--in, on, or off the Earth.

Unfortunately, a trip to the dump does not cause Ikea shelving to cease to exist. It's still there, just as Mir is still there on the ocean floor. We've just stopped admiring it, that's all.

That's the true commonality between blundering Soviet metaphysics and sleek Euro minimalism. Truly sophisticated design wouldn't blast us out of the natural realm with raw power. It wouldn't even use less to do more. Instead, it would use its power and ingenuity to vanish entirely on command. Planned evanescence. Evanescence is the only true completion to the life cycle of any product. Technology: evaporating.

Dave Prager recently graduated from Syracuse University and lives in New York City.

COPYRIGHT 2001 New Whole Earth LLC
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning