AN/FPS-24 Radar Tower, Mt. Umunhum, Los Gatos, CA, 2024.
Several additional pixels at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/53796724938
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this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2025
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I have mixed feelings about these cold war relics. On the one hand, they're artifacts of what was perhaps humanity's most dangerous folly to date, locking the world in a deadly game where the stakes only went up with each round. This doesn't seem like something to commemorate or celebrate.
On the other hand, these objects, many now destroyed or decayed, serve as visible evidence of just how close to oblivion we are willing to go. And looked at from the right angle, they have stories to tell.
@[email protected] I lived through that era, telling younger friends about it now there is a disconnect as it is abstract. At least these relics make it real for them, maybe (hopefully) making some of my current paranoia and political “take” seem slightly more, well, justified.
@[email protected] It now seems hard to believe that for the first 50% of my life I lived with an entirely rational background fear that all of civilization might end at any moment with less than 30 minutes notice, possibly by accident.
I lack the vocabulary to describe it adequately.
@[email protected] @[email protected]
I was an Army brat. At 8 years I dreaded the drills, because I already knew they were useless. The only place I ever lived as a child where they weren't done was "nowhereville" Arizona while my father was in Vietnam. I was (thankfully) too young to understand why Christmas came before he left that year. Just how serious was it my generation Z and millennial coworkers want to know. In 1963, before I was born, my father called my mother while he was stationed in Anchorage and said, "Take the kids and the car and get out of Anchorage now." She did. My mother was the strongest person I've ever known. I feel the dread coming back, but not because of the old reason, but because of the very old reason. If it's not H5N1 it'll be something else - maybe even something we thought we'd licked because time has a way of making history repeat. Tempus fugit, momento mori.