On the morning of December 1, 2020, a 900-ton platform fell 500 feet in thirty seconds above a limestone sinkhole in northern Puerto Rico, and with it ended fifty-seven years of science that had quietly reshaped humanity's understanding of the cosmos. Arecibo Observatory — born from Cold War anxiety, repurposed by curiosity, and sustained by generations of patient astronomers — did not receive the deliberate farewell its keepers had planned. The structure that had confirmed gravitational waves indirectly, found the first exoplanets, and tracked asteroids on paths toward Earth was taken not by