Well, Chicken Little. There you have it. The dang sky did fall right down and go boom. Or so it may have seemed to some folks in the Great Lakes State. In this case, though, it was a little piece of Samsung.
Truthfully, a big piece. I am sure many of you have already seen the news story and the photos, but for those of you who missed it, here goes. A Samsung “pseudo satellite” fell from the sky Saturday morning in a rural Michigan neighborhood. In a place called Gratiot County.
I looked up Gratiot. It is pretty much dead-center in the state, north of Lansing, and just east of where the mitten’s thumb and and hand hook are. A couple of people who live the area, heard the crash around 8:45 in the morning. The officials there in Gratiot had the fire department close the roadway where the “satellite” fell. Apparently, it got caught up in some live power lines.
If I am following the press release right, this was a Samsung satellite that is directly involved with their mobile phones. Now, I use an iPhone, and I would swear by them. As far as I know, the Apple Crew has not dropped any heavy metal from space. And don’t get me wrong. I like Samsung. They make the best TVs on the market, in my opinion. Anyway, it wasn’t anything to do with their TVs. It was all phone related. So back to that.
The have come up with something called the Samsung SpaceSelfie project. This is designed to give the customers the ability to get their pictures with a backdrop of space. And to do this, they are using a high-altitude balloon to carry a Galaxy S10 5G phone into the stratosphere.
And, according to the panicking people in the press rooms at Samsung, they released a statement saying that “Samsung’s SpaceSelfie balloon came back down to earth. During this planned descent of the balloon to land in the U.S., weather conditions resulted in an early soft landing in a selected rural area. We regret any inconvenience this may have caused.”
Or. In other words. “Look out below.” Honestly, if it had hit someone, it would have killed them, I think. Of course, that would have been tragic, Henny Penny aka Chicken Little fans. But here is the other thing. This was a “Space Selfie Project” designed so that people could take selfies with a space background. What in the holy heck have we become?
Do you remember how most of us were embarrassed to get our pictures taken once upon a time? At least, most of the people I knew in the world before information technology took over, were a little self-conscious about the entire photo experience. (My Mom amassed nearly 100 photo albums from the time she was married to the time she fell to dementia.). So I have some real-life encounters on which I base these statements.
But these days, people stop at nothing to get a picture of themselves. The self portrait has become the flag our own little country of me. It is a social badge of honor, in some cases. In others, the bragging rights of our own self-beauty, wealth, or status. The number of deaths, per YEAR, from selfies is around 100 (on average, for the past few years).
Selfies aren’t all bad. In moderation, as with anything. There are times when it is fun to capture a special moment, and grin it up with your friends as the Captain Blackbeard statue looms large behind you, or as you sit on Bigfoot’s lap with your honey. But these days, the “need to be liked” on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, and a dozen others, has driven our society to needing satellites in space to expand our experience.
Satellites, that fall from the sky, and crash back down to Planet Earth. Maybe the end of the world really is coming, Chicken Little. But rest assured. There will be millions of people who will capture the event with a great selfie.
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“We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.”
― May Sarton
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“We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin.”
― André Berthiaume
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“The problem with introspection is that it has no end.”
― Philip K. Dick
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