The week in pictures: July 30–August 5, 2011

Its amazing how they can move them to new configurations

Wow! You made them big enough for us to actually see on a laptop screen. Amazing! How long is that meteor trail? The Mars one looks like the result of bad cooking. 'Planet of the Microwaves?' You think that millimeter dish transporter will sink into that solid rock mountain, or do they need another 20 wheels on it? That dish must be made out of uranium. I wonder if that yellow transporter is custom made, or just your standard Caterpillar Model D1 Giant Atacama Desert Large Millimeter Array Dish Antenna Transporter? I'm old enough to remember when people had dishes almost that big in their back yards. Now that the TV people have switched to digital, you need a dish or cable TV, unless you live in a big city, because the digital signals don't go as far as the old analog ones. One day, a giant solar storm will burn most of those satellites' electronics up. Then they will go out of control and crash into each other, making space travel impossible due to all the billions of pieces of space junk. All the pieces reentering the Earth's atmosphere over hundreds of years will make an interesting spectacle. People won't get stiff necks looking up, while waiting for the usually rare real meteor. We are poorly adapted for looking up, probably because we can't fly. It is also evidence that we didn't coexist with the largest flying dinosaurs that may have had us for lunch, if we didn't notice them coming. As it is, the polar bears are bad enough. 20 years ago today, the first web site went online. Keep your printing presses, because a huge solar storm will shut the web down too. It will give me a chance to read ALL of the back issues, by candle light.