On Top of Everything Else, a NASA Satellite Might Crash on You

New in PJ Media:

NASA issued a warning Tuesday: a 600-pound manmade satellite that is no longer in use, that is, a hunk of metal about as big as a vending machine, is going to fall out of the sky on Wednesday evening and could kill someone. Believe it or not, there’s a valuable lesson in that.

The UK’s Daily Mail reported that this big hunk of space junk “will reenter the Earth’s atmosphere at 9:30 pm ET, with most of it burning up in the sky. But some components will survive the descent and NASA warns ‘the risk of harm coming to anyone is… one in 2,467.’” Not only that but “experts are not sure yet where the debris will fall.” So there isn’t even any place you can go where you can be sure that you won’t be mashed into an accordion by a falling satellite.

That means it isn’t worth worrying about since worrying won’t change the outcome anyway, but it also means that there is a very real possibility that someone on Earth will be killed by this thing. It’s a peculiarly modern fear: space junk, like so many other things, could kill us.

The great caricature artist Dave Washburn once drew a two-panel cartoon in which a happy-go-lucky fellow is ambling down a city street and saying, “I sure hope an anvil don’t fall on me today.” In the second panel, he is crushed under a massive safe that fell from a building and is saying, “I meant to say a safe.” It’s always been one of my favorite cartoons, as it pretty much sums up my philosophy of life: if one thing doesn’t get you, something else will, so there’s no point in worrying.

The point is this: although we don’t generally like to think about it and often pretend that it isn’t so, life is finite. As Bill Clinton’s Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders sagely noted, “Everybody’s probably gonna die from something.” I hate to contradict the sage former chief doctor, but actually, there is no “probably” about it. If COVID-19 doesn’t get you, or the COVID vaccine, or the bugs Old Joe Biden wants you to eat, or a train derailment, or the Russians, you could be crushed by a vending machine that falls from space. The lesson here is not to be morbid or fearful, but courageous.

The real pandemic is cowardice. These are once again times that try people’s souls, and yet all too many Americans have internalized the idea that standing up against the Leftist machine is not worth the professional harm that could ensue. Yet the Left’s comprehensive political, social, and cultural offensive calls on us all to be activists, after the manner of the parents who stood against drag queens and Critical Race Theory in primary schools and got smeared as “domestic terrorists” by the FBI for their efforts.

There is more. Read the rest here.