The threat of a disastrous event is always lurking in low Earth orbit, frustratingly unpredictable but worryingly persistent. It’s not unlike the major earthquake that is expected to rock California in the coming decades. In the orbital landscape, the “Big One” could come in the form of any number of scenarios: collisions between satellites, the intentional shooting-down of a spacecraft, a nuclear event. But the outcome of such a seismic event in orbit is the same. A tremendous burst of fast-moving shards, indiscriminate in their destruction, will whiz through Earth’s jam-packed coating of satellites, threatening to tip the world below into a new reality.
A “Big One” in space would be a strangely quiet event. We would not see the swaying of the infrastructure that makes so much of our modern life possible; instead disaster would manifest right in the palms of our hands as our smartphones suddenly struggled to work. Satellite technology provides communications, GPS, and even an accounting of time to people, businesses, and governments around the world. If it fails, power grids, agricultural functions, shipping routes, and banking transactions could quickly falter too. New missions to restore technological normalcy would launch into a more perilous environment, one that may be too dangerous for astronauts to traverse. In the worst-case scenario, a hypothetical phenomenon called Kessler syndrome, space could become so overpopulated that collisions lead to a cascade of even more collisions, rendering low Earth orbit nearly impossible to navigate.
Cafeterias – where workers put food on customers’ plates for them – took off in the United States soon after Henry Ford invented the assembly line. The two are kin, but instead of a car rolling past stationary workers, the diners slide their trays down the line to receive a slice of prime rib, chicken fried steak or even trout almondine. A diner can watch as somebody on the other side scoops up green beans or squash casserole at one station and another tongs cornbread muffins or yeast rolls onto your plate. It’s an assembly line at its finest, a monument to the idea of early-20th-century progress. The cafeteria made dining more efficient while maintaining the quality and variety of foods that paying customers expected.
In Sugar Land, Texas, Luby’s and “cafeteria” were synonymous. I’ve since learned that my friends from other parts of the South have their own Platonic ideals: Cleburne, Furr’s, Piccadilly, Golden Corral. When you share a childhood cafeteria with someone – and especially if you’re both passionate about the Jell-O squares or the yeast rolls – you bond. It is an immediate connection.
So even though I’m a wee little sport climber, mockable in all ways, I still apply too much idealism to Everest to quietly accept the theme-park images that flow off the peak each spring season. Given the mountain’s understandable allure, I don’t want to begrudge people who want to go suck oxygen in high places, but I wish that their well-publicized “climbs” weren’t cheapening the accomplishments of the truly talented, die-hard alpinists who are still out there doing very cool new things on the world’s highest peaks—especially since the mainstream media seems to have so much trouble distinguishing between the two.
OK. I’m done.
The FTC’s action is the latest battle in a longstanding war over market power in food retailing. It raises some perplexing questions about which neither courts nor economists who specialize in competition have had much to say. What if blocking the union of two giants benefits other, even larger giants? Should antitrust law be used to improve labor unions’ bargaining power? And what, exactly, is a supermarket?
“When you’re spinning around while being pulled to the ground, it’s hard to know exactly what’s happening. I was in my own world. All I was thinking about was how to get out of the situation. I felt oddly calm.
“I do remember seeing the ground coming towards me really quickly and I thought to myself: ‘This is going to hurt.’”
There is something very heartening, touching even, about a travel writer who still finds his own country so full of fascination, so rich in moments of discovery as well as things to deplore, no matter how many years roll by.