Melancholia Was Right

A meteor came down in Chelyabinsk and caught everyone unprepared. Hundreds of people got hurt, mostly from windows exploding inward when the blast wave hit. The scientists had their attention elsewhere that day—watching asteroid 2012 DA14, which passed within 28,000 kilometers of Earth. Close in cosmic terms, but it missed. The one nobody was tracking hit first.

The dashcam footage went up on YouTube and the usual prophets arrived in the comments. John Lennon quotes, apocalyptic visions, divine judgment. Someone wrote In Soviet Russia, you hit Meteorite! like Russia had finally found its cosmic purpose. End of the world stuff, which is always funnier when it almost is.

I’d spent most of that year living with Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. A film about a rogue planet the color of a swimming pool hurtling toward Earth while a naked Kirsten Dunst watches the inevitable arrive. Nothing to do about it. No last-minute solution, no heroic deflection. Just the clear, beautiful knowledge that everything ends and you can’t change that. It sits in you because it doesn’t lie about control. And then a rock fell out of the sky.

Russia’s deputy prime minister decided they weren’t going to accept this passively. Dmitrij Rogosin wanted technology developed to destroy dangerous asteroids in space—lasers, missiles, whatever works. Someone’s job would now be blow up asteroid. It’s absurd until you realize there’s no actual system in place.

The technology wouldn’t stop a planet named Melancholia, wouldn’t save the fathers in stables or the children in shelters that can’t shelter anything. But knowing someone somewhere was thinking about the possibility, making plans, shifted something small inside me. Not much. Just a bit. Enough to feel slightly safer, or at least less alone with it.