Smoke pollutes, but here we were, inhaling deeply. The show must go on, as some say; the liturgy, as others say. What is clear is that the spectacle has been unanimously masculine. It is precisely that men are interested in everything men do and that the revolution of the Catholic Church is always not to make a revolution. But I have lost my way to heaven. Never better said. By heaven, not by the saint, because what fascinates me is not a spiritual leader, and even less a pope, but the probe launched by the Soviet Union in 1972 and expected to fall to Earth before the end of the week. According to the European Space Agency, it will be on Saturday at 8:18 a.m., with an 18-hour margin. That's no small margin. If these ESA guys ever lose their jobs, they can always go work for the commuter train.
It's nothing new for garbage to fall from the sky; in fact, we generate so much garbage that I wouldn't be surprised if it could fill space, although lately what we're getting the most is rocks, perhaps for some prophetic reason, or call it spring, call it climate change. And it seems that the rocks have already done much more damage than that probe that's expected to fall into the sea; you don't want to know how much shit that's accumulated too, poor thing. According to space statistics, nothing has ever fallen on a person in 70 years, and the probability is as small as being struck by five lightning bolts. We all know people who are very unlucky, despite the statistics, so... But we trust that, at most, it will fall on some fish, the casualties of the moment, because we can't imagine it falling on a cruise ship. Well, we do imagine it, but as a movie plot. It wouldn't be paradoxical if a Soviet Union probe ended up falling, 53 years later, on one of the most questionable middle-class leisure options of our time. And cruise ship is also the name of the church floor. It's true that, whether you like it or not, everything ends up connected.
The probe in question, which they called Kosmos 482, which, as a name, yes, was destined for Venus, but never left Earth's orbit. Unlike popes, who live outside of orbit. Sorry. The probe measured one meter in diameter and weighed a ton. But time is relentless, and with age, we change. And since this was a secret project of the Soviet Union, it's unknown how it evolved. Only the Russians know. It's something like that thing with the cardinals, who make it out of an unjustified mystery among themselves, because the true mystery remains the Holy Trinity. In any case, the whole thing has an air of Goodbye Lenin Which makes it quite endearing, even if the science people come along later and smash your guitar, telling you that every week rockets and satellites re-enter the atmosphere. And that the Soviet probe isn't like a meteorite, in terms of the effects its fall can cause; this means that the probe's effects are minor, meaning that anyone who wants the meteorite to fall to put an end to all the global nonsense, that's not the case.
The science people don't understand that for people who only look at the sky to know if we have to take out the washing line, it seems quite extraordinary that an object that was sent in 1972, that didn't reach its destination, and about which little is known because it was a Cold War secret, is about to fall this week. In fact, it's infinitely more extraordinary than watching a few men get together to decide who else is going to lead their company.
