Ancient Engineers

This is sort of a followon post to the one titled "Immense Spans of Time".

One anniversary that I should included in that post is this one: This year marks 40 years since I went to work at NASA in Houston, primarily on the Apollo missions.

I'm on a mailing list for news about people I used to work with at NASA. I was contacted about it, and signed up, quite recently - just in time to start getting e-mails about people being in the hospital or dying. Not from accidents but natural causes, which is to say, old age.

Sometimes there are photos of the people. Oooooold people, impersonating the youngish folks I worked with back then.

Shiver!

I should mention that I was younger than most of my coworkers. I was in my mid- to late-twenties when I worked there, and most of the other people were a few years older than that, with a few as much as ten or twenty years older. So those e-mails are scarcely surprising. But they still make me uncomfortable.