Time For A Yard Sale?

It is reported in the Detroit Free Press today that folks in the International Space Station are running into an issue with too much stuff. That's right, where storage space is at a premium, they've more or less run out of it. The space station is filled to the brim with junk, and there's more junk than there is living room. It's gotten so that the folks who are tasked to work in space are having problems finding the stuff that they need to get their work done.

It's a comfort, really, to know that after all this time and effort the folks 'up there' are pretty much like the folks 'down here'. First you can't find something that seems important, then your mate implies that it's early onset Alzheimer's setting in, then you tear everything apart and eventually you find what it is you were looking for, at which point the entire Saturday is wasted and everything's in a helluva mess. You might even proceed to stage two.

Stage Two is when you back the pickup up to the garage and start loading 'er up for a couple runs to the landfill-kinda like what's going to happen next week when the shuttle arrives.

There's going to be a big housecleaning, the result of which is that nothing will have changed all that much. I'm informed by my colleagues with a scientific bent that the natural state of everything is "entropy". Well. I have news for them, and the proof's in-the natural state of the environment when people enter the picture is clutter. It is the inevitable result of the human condition.