2020 - What the Hell was that all about???

So, we’re finally coming to the end of 2020 with almost worrying momentum. It has certainly been a year to remember. It certainly threw some rather unique personal and professional challenges at me, while at the same time moving in a direction I had not anticipated at all, like, completely. And since we’re already well into December, the month of year reviews, let me start this one by expressing my true feelings about 2020:

ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS???

I think it’s safe to say that 2020 has been a complete dumpster fire of a year. It’s like some bored deity, think along the lines of the loafers on ancient Mt. Olympus, got a shovel, dug deep into the bag marked “biblical plagues” and dumped the whole shovel right on top of us. Burning continents, political brinkmanship, a pandemic the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the 1918 Spanish Flu, social unrest unlike anything seen since the Civil Rights movement, and that was just the first half of this year. Add to that a hurricane season for the record books, wildfires in California that are still raging, way outside the regular wildfire season, Ireland getting hit by winter storms in August, and you can begin to see just why 2020 will be one for the record books.

Oh, but there’s so much more: Murder Hornets in America, a president who’s willing to tear his country apart just to stay in power, a government in London that seems hell-bent on national suicide for ideological reasons, yet another war in the Caucasus, a smouldering conflict in the Aegean, smouldering ruins in Beirut after an absolutely apocalyptic explosion, the Amazon skipping the smouldering part and going straight for an all-out inferno, the list goes on and on and on and on.

All of that wouldn’t be so bad if people would at least get a fucking grip on themselves and work together to end this shit show. However, any sense of cooperation, civic or personal responsibility or similar positive traits seem to have gone right out the bloody window. Take the ongoing pandemic, which I’m not going to call a global pandemic because that’s fucking redundant. When you have a potentially airborne virus that infects the respiratory tract, the easiest way to prevent that virus from spreading is to stand apart, wear masks that capture or at least deflect the air that you’re breathing out and avoid direct contact with other people as much as possible, particularly when it comes to vulnerable people with damaged immune systems. Simple, right? Apparently not, there’s a worryingly large group of people who are either incapable of understanding this basic concept or too self-centred to adhere to it. Instead, they act like a horde of panicked porcupines in a bubble-wrap warehouse!

That being said, not everything was horrible in 2020. On a global level, SpaceX finally started their commercial crew flights with their Crew Dragon spacecraft and as I’m writing this, they are both preparing their heavy Spaceship launch vehicle for its first 15 kilometre test flight and full landing sequence at their Boca Chica test site in southern Texas. Even further out, we’ve detected possible biosignatures in the atmosphere of Venus, while sample return missions are currently either in place or on their way back from the asteroid belt and the moon.

On a more personal level, 2020 has been far more of a mixed bag and less of a total shit show. There was still plenty of that to go around, mind you: Ongoing battles with my mental health, two weeks of intense sickness back in January 2020, followed by an overly long recovery period with a persistent cough, performance slumps at work and prolonged isolation were all features of my life in 2020, not to mention my own little COVID-19 scare back in October, which thankfully turned out to be a false alarm. On the other hand, I’ve had the first long time off in years, and even got the chance to visit Hamburg, the best city in Germany on the company dime during a lull in the pandemic.

And then there was the comet. As a kid in Prague, I was able see both Hyakutake and Hale-Bopp, the so-called comet of the century, though I remember being less than impressed by them. Then, this summer, newly discovered comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE blazed its way through the solar system, providing the world with a show unlike anything seen in the previous 20 years, eventually becoming so bright that I could easily snap it from my balcony in a built-up area with out much of a hassle at all. In fact, it was even easily visible with the naked eye the first time I spotted it, and was absolutely spectacular even through a basic set of binoculars. That alone almost made my year, and got me looking into getting a telescope again for personal use. This particular comet may not be back until 7000-7500 years from now, but there are plenty of other objects in the Oort Cloud that might decide to put on a show. Just so long as they don’t get too close, 2020 has been crappy enough already.

Still, even though the global situation is decidedly horrible, 2020 hasn’t been a total disaster. Granted, there are still three weeks to go to the end of the year by the time I’m writing this, and in 2020 this means that anything can still happen, but for the time being, I’m cautiously hopeful. I have a decent job, a nice warm apartment, a few loyal friends and, through this blog, a way to express myself and get my views and opinions out. Given all that’s happened this year, that’s more than a lot of people have, so yeah, I’m really thankful.

Oh, and can someone tell me just what the hell is going on with those monoliths???