Living through decline

There's an idea--I don't know who to properly credit it to--that even living in the declining days of the Roman Empire wasn't so bad. Sure things seemed a little worse each year, and your parents complained about how things were better in their day, but didn't every generation say that? You were still Romans and you still had roads and government and taxes. But maybe an acqueduct broke and nobody could fix it so it just stayed broken. And you improvised a fix around it and felt clever.

What if this is like that?

On 1 December 2020, the 900-ton instrument platform of the Arecibo Observatory crashed into its dish.

Humans haven't left low earth orbit since 1972.