Arecibo: 900 Tons of Fuck Around and Find Out

In 2012, I was bored.

That’s it.

There was no grand travel plan. No bucket list. No lifelong dream of exploring Puerto Rico. I had some free time, flights to San Juan were cheap’ish, and apparently that was all the justification I required to get on an airplane.

So I went to Puerto Rico.

This is how a disturbing percentage of my travel decisions begin.

Once I got there, I needed shit to do. Unfortunately, my Spanish vocabulary topped out somewhere around baño, cerveza, and pointing at things.

At some point, my giant science-nerd brain remembered something I’d recently seen in a movie. Wait a minute. Isn’t that enormous telescope thingy from the movies somewhere in Puerto Rico?

It was.

We’re off to see the giant space thing.

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DESTINATION: Arecibo Observatory

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NORMAL PEOPLE WENT TO THE BEACH. I WENT LOOKING FOR A RADIO TELESCOPE.

I’d seen Aricbo in GoldenEye, where Pierce Brosnan and Sean Bean beat the shit out of each other above the telescope. It was also prominently featured in Contact with Jodie Foster and had appeared in Species, among other movies and television shows.

Hollywood had apparently spent decades using Arecibo whenever it needed a location that looked sufficiently enormous, scientific and slightly insane.

And unlike most movie sets, this thing was real.

Even better, it was only about 90 minutes from San Juan.

The drive out of San Juan gradually transitioned from city to mountains, jungle and increasingly smaller roads.

This wasn’t exactly Disney World’s Space Mountain.

Arecibo was a working scientific facility buried in the karst hills of Puerto Rico, and the closer I got, the more everything around me seemed to disappear.

Eventually, signs started telling visitors to turn off cell phones and radio transmitters.

Most tourist attractions desperately want you connected to free WiFi to download and share your experience.

Arecibo basically said: TURN YOUR SHIT OFF. THE SCIENTISTS ARE BUSY.

I already loved this place.

Then I arrived at the visitor center.

Nothing.

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BREAKING NEWS: TOURISTS FOUND THE BEACH

When I say Arecibo wasn’t crowded, I don’t mean there were six people instead of sixty.

I mean I was the only tourist there.

To be fair, Arecibo absolutely wasn’t some forgotten science project nobody visited. Puerto Rican schoolchildren came here on field trips, which makes perfect sense when one of the world’s greatest scientific instruments is sitting in your backyard. Generations of local kids got to stand there, look across that enormous dish and presumably discover either a lifelong fascination with science or an urgent desire to get back on the school bus.

But tourists?

Apparently we had other shit to do.

There were no tour buses unloading sunburned visitors from San Juan. No lines. No crowds fighting for the observation deck. No international pilgrimage of science nerds wearing NASA shirts.

Just me, wandering around the visitor center reading about radio astronomy, pulsars, planetary radar and all kinds of wonderfully nerdy shit while wondering where the hell everybody was.

There wasn’t some elaborate tourist production happening.

There really wasn’t anything happening for tourists.

And that was exactly what made it incredible.

Scientists were working.

Engineers were doing whatever extremely intelligent people do when somebody gives them a thousand-foot-wide radio telescope to play with.

Arecibo wasn’t performing for us. It was doing actual science.

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CONGRATULATIONS, HUMANS. THIS WAS OUR IDEA OF THE FUTURE.

Then I walked outside and saw the dish.

Pictures don’t properly explain Arecibo. You have to understand the scale.

The reflector was 305 meters, or roughly 1,000 feet, across, built directly into a natural sinkhole in the mountains. It looked less like somebody constructed a telescope and more like aliens had installed a satellite dish for their Puerto Rican vacation home.

And the timing makes it even better.

Arecibo opened in 1963, right in the middle of that glorious era when America looked at technology, aviation and science and apparently decided there was absolutely no problem that couldn’t be solved by building something fucking enormous.

This was the same general period that gave us Apollo, Concorde and, a few years later, plans for the absolutely batshit Everglades Jetport in South Florida, an airport envisioned for the coming age of supersonic aviation that eventually became one gigantic runway surrounded by alligators and shattered optimism.

Arecibo somehow represented the version of that futuristic thinking that actually worked.

Scientists didn’t just build something enormous because enormous looked cool.

They built something enormous because they needed to listen to the fucking universe.

And standing above that dish in 2012, it was hard not to admire the audacity of it.

Then you looked up.

Suspended hundreds of feet above the reflector was the really insane part: a massive instrument platform weighing approximately 900 tons, hanging from cables connected to enormous towers around the site.

Nine.

Hundred.

Tons.

Just hanging there.

Apparently somebody in the 1960s looked at a thousand-foot hole in the Puerto Rican jungle and said, “You know what this needs? Nine hundred tons of science dangling over it.”

And somehow, for decades, they were absolutely right.

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ONE TOURIST. ZERO SELFIE STICKS. MINOR BRIBERY REQUIRED.

Eventually, I encountered a serious problem.

I wanted a picture of myself with Arecibo.

Today this would be easy.

Prop up your phone.

Use a smartwatch.

Carry a tripod.

Deploy a drone.

Ask one of the 47 influencers standing nearby recording TikToks.

But this was 2012.

And more importantly:

THERE WAS NOBODY FUCKING THERE.

I waited.

Nothing.

Eventually I found an employee.

I asked if he would take my picture.

There may have been a little persuasion involved.

Possibly monetary persuasion.

So yes, I effectively bribed an employee at one of humanity’s greatest scientific facilities to take my tourist photo.

He took the picture.

I thanked him.

Life continued.

At the time, it was simply another photograph from another random trip.

Eight years later, that stupid picture became something completely different.

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SPOILER ALERT: GRAVITY EVENTUALLY WON

On December 1, 2020, I woke up and saw Arecibo on the news again.

Because apparently 2020 hadn’t done enough yet.

We were nine months into COVID, international travel was basically dead, everyone had become an amateur epidemiologist, Zoom was somehow considered a social activity, and hording toilet paper had briefly become a thing.

At this point, waking up and checking the news was less about asking “What happened?” and more about discovering which fresh layer of bullshit 2020 had unlocked overnight.

That morning, it was Arecibo.

The previous few months hadn’t been kind to Arecibo. One support cable failed in August. Another failed in November.

Engineers determined the structure had become dangerously unstable and repairs were too risky, so the National Science Foundation announced that the telescope would be decommissioned.

Because naturally, in the middle of a global pandemic, my favorite giant radio telescope also decided to start falling the fuck apart.

Then Arecibo decided it wasn’t waiting around for the paperwork.

At 7:53 in the morning, the remaining support system failed.

The same 900-ton platform I’d stood beneath eight years earlier came crashing down into the reflector dish.

And cameras captured the whole thing.

Of course I watched it.

Then I watched it again.

The cables begin failing.

The platform moves.

For a fraction of a second, this enormous structure that had been suspended above the dish for decades seems almost motionless.

Then gravity collects its debt.

Nine hundred tons of scientific history falls out of the sky.

The platform smashes into the reflector.

Cables whip through the air.

Sections of the towers collapse.

The enormous dish is shredded.

Fifty-seven years of astronomy disappears in seconds.

It was spectacular.

It was horrifying.

And I was absolutely fucking crushed.

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GOOD NEWS: NOTHING BROKE IS A TERRIBLE HEADLINE

Arecibo’s death wasn’t simply a story about one cable snapping.

The observatory had spent years dealing with aging infrastructure, funding uncertainty, management changes and the spectacularly expensive reality of keeping a giant precision scientific instrument alive in a humid tropical jungle.

Then Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico in 2017 and damaged the facility.

Then came more storms.

Then earthquakes.

Jesus Christ, Puerto Rico couldn’t catch a fucking break.

But there’s another frustrating part of stories like Arecibo: maintaining complicated infrastructure is incredibly boring right up until the moment somebody doesn’t.

I’ve seen the other end of that equation at places like Three Mile Island, where enormously complicated technology, human decisions and institutional failures combined to produce the most serious accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power history.

Different technology. Different circumstances. Different outcome.

Same irritating lesson.

Preventing disasters doesn’t photograph particularly well.

Nobody wakes up excited because engineers inspected a cable and replaced it before it failed.

Nobody produces breaking-news coverage announcing: SCIENTISTS PERFORM MAINTENANCE. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TERRIBLE HAPPENS.

But that’s exactly what you want.

Because when maintaining infrastructure works, the result is wonderfully boring.

The telescope keeps listening.

The reactor keeps behaving.

The bridge remains stubbornly attached to both sides of the river.

And everyone goes about their lives completely unaware of the catastrophe that didn’t happen.

Unfortunately, catastrophe gets considerably better ratings.

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TURNS OUT THE STUPID RANDOM TRIP MATTERED

After the collapse, I kept thinking about 2012.

About being bored.

About seeing cheap’ish flights to San Juan.

About remembering that giant telescope I’d recently seen in a movie and thinking: I should go see that.

That’s the entire chain of events that put me at Arecibo.

There was no special occasion.

No final tour.

No warning that I was visiting something that wouldn’t exist eight years later.

I simply drove into the mountains and accidentally had one of the world’s most extraordinary scientific facilities practically to myself.

At the time, Arecibo felt permanent.

Of course it did.

It had been sitting there since 1963.

It survived hurricanes.

It survived earthquakes.

It survived Puerto Rican humidity trying to eat it alive.

It survived changing governments, funding priorities and generations of scientists.

That giant dish looked like part of the fucking mountain.

And then one morning it wasn’t.

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MAYBE THE REAL TOURIST ATTRACTION WAS THE NERDS WE MET ALONG THE WAY

I’ve traveled to plenty of places because they’re beautiful.

I’ve traveled to others because they’re historically important.

And I’ve traveled to an alarming number because somebody said “there’s really nothing there,” which remains one of the most effective ways to get me to immediately start looking for flights.

Arecibo was different.

There really wasn’t much there for a tourist.

That was the point.

It was a giant scientific instrument doing giant scientific things while a bunch of super-nerds quietly worked behind the scenes trying to understand the universe.

There weren’t thousands of tourists.

There wasn’t some heavily produced “Arecibo Experience.”

There was a visitor center, an observation area, some exhibits and one absolutely ridiculous piece of human engineering sitting in the Puerto Rican jungle.

And somehow, for one random afternoon in 2012, I had the place almost completely to myself.

I’m incredibly grateful that boredom and cheap airfare put me there.

I’m grateful I remembered seeing it in a movie.

I’m grateful I made the drive.

And I’m especially grateful I found some poor employee willing to accept whatever minor bribe was necessary to document the fact that at least one fucking tourist showed up that day.

Because I’ll never be able to take that trip again.

Arecibo spent 57 years listening to the universe.

Then politics, budgets, hurricanes, aging infrastructure and assorted government fuckery caught up with it.

Gravity handled the closing ceremony.

Rest in pieces, Arecibo.