Who'll Be the Third?
There's a running semi-joke that celebrity deaths always come in threes. So far this week, 1) Mr. Rogers died of stomach cancer, and 2) Pioneer 10 stopped working. If I were Big Bird or Voyager 2, I'd be pretty nervous right about now...
On a less flippant note, each of the deaths is significant in its own way. Fred Rogers was, by all reports, one of the most genuinely nice people ever to walk the planet (and with the current vogue for celebrity character assassination, the fact that nobody ever seems to have found anything bad to say about him is astonishing). To be perfectly honest, even as a kid, I was never hugely into his show, but he absolutely defined children's programming for a generation or two, and was four or five steps above the Barney/ Tellytubbies level of insipidity. He had a big role in shaping many of today's adults, and I can't recall ever hearing of a wing nut rabid enough to call him a corrupting influence. The list of people who might fill that role today is, well, nonexistent.
Pioneer 10, on the other hand, being a man-made object, had basically no personality, but is probably the leading contender in the "exceeding design expectations" sweepstakes. Launched in 1972 for a 21-month mission, it kept ticking along for more than thirty years and something like seven and a half billion miles. Two million years from now, it'll confuse the hell out of our distant descendants when it reaches Aldebaran. (To find that the Death Star has just... oh, never mind). It never reached the iconic status of the Voyager probes (or Mr. Rogers, for that matter), but Pioneer 10 was an impressive technological achievement all the same.
(The "exceeding design expectations" debate ran for a few days on a mailing list I'm on. Other suggested candidates for most impressive technological overachiever included the B-52 bomber (40 years old, and still able to rain fiery death on Middle Easterners who have displeased us), and the Viking long ship (shallow enough to sail a long way up most European rivers, but seaworthy enough to reach Newfoundland). Elite company, either way...)
If you're feeling reflective this weekend, raise a glass to the memory of the nicest man in television, and the hardiest little beeping space probe on record. Or, if you're feeling cynical, lay your bets on the third to fall...
Posted at 4:40 PM | link | follow-ups |