“Ashes to Ashes.  Dust to Dust”

By Ron Stultz

 19 October 2004

1. If he had only known when he wiped the piece of "sand", "dirt", from his eye that it was the complete encapsulated knowledge of an ancient civilization, long since disappeared from the universe, he might not have simply tossed the tissue in the trash.  But he did and no one even noticed. 

2. “They” might have thought it ironic, or sad, or whatever emotions they might be capable of, if their instruments had even noticed when the small space probe hit their ship, but to them, their instruments, the probe was nothing more than space dust.

And so the last artifact of a universe evolution on a small planet, long since consumed by its sun, was gone. Earth.

Ashes to ashes.  Dust to dust. 

Sad in a way.  Billions of years for atoms to combine and recombine and recombine again in some mysterious way or via mysterious forces until men walked on the moon, built buildings which reached tall into the sky, learned secrets of the universe and finally built one last space probe, only to have it all disappear forever, without a trace on a windshield.

The cosmos sure is a funny place.