Lonely Affinity

Despite all their highly sophisticated sensory devices that you see so much in submarine movies, two nuclear missile subs, one sent there by the British and the other by the French, went to sleep at their scopes in the middle of the Atlantic and collided earlier this month. But luckily they didn't drop anything important, and they got back to their bases safely.

One official said that, with the Atlantic being so huge, the chance of that happening was unbelievable.

But outer space is many, many times bigger, while satellites are smaller than subs, yet a few days ago two of those also crashed head-on into each other. One belonged to the Russians and the other to the U.S., so predictably this left a lot of debris floating around to endanger the many other manmade objects floating around up there.

Consequently calls have gone out for satellite wreckage watching as well as for space traffic control, as if it wasn't enough already for people with telescopes down here to keep an eye out for wayward asteroids and comets that are coming our way and it's only a matter of time, whether it be seconds or eons.

You would think that any town in the first days of cars would be big enough for the first few machines in them to easily avoid each other, yet I seem to remember a story about the first two in one town seeking each other out and having a big smash-up together.

It must be a law of nature that objects that are alike in a setting that seems boundless must develop a strong affinity for getting way up close and personal with each other that can't be resisted.

...Or either in all three cases people were not admitting something.

The people who steered the Titanic weren't as lucky. There were too many witnesses, and besides, the iceberg and the ship weren't similar objects. One was part of the sea and the other wasn't, though it is now, and has been for just short of a hundred years already.