It’s pretty amazing when you think about it. We earthlings have been visiting space for almost 60 years now and this is what we’ve made of it…space that is.
Above is an actual image from the NASA Goddard Flight Space Center. I can remember sitting on the front stoop of our home in New Jersey with my mom and looking up into the evening sky to see if we could spot Sputnik, the Russian satellite that was the first of its kind in orbit around Earth, and as far as we knew, the only thing.
I was 4 years old then. Now look at what we’ve left up there…so far
Right now, more than half a million pieces of man-made space junk are orbiting our planet Earth. And about 23,000 of those pieces are the size of a softball or larger. More than 21,000 pieces of orbital debris larger than 10 cm are known to exist and the number of particles smaller than 1 cm exceeds 100 million!
I know that doesn’t mean much to those of us Earthlings who have no plans to ever leave our atmosphere but some scientists are now predicting that if some of us don’t leave soon, no one ever will because it will be impossible for one of our spacecraft to make it safely past all of the junk.
On the bright side it should make it a bit harder for aliens to attack us, although why they would want to visit or take over this mess of a planet is beyond me… Unless of course they offer a cleaning service…and cheap!
But what is sobering about the above photo is that the outside of our planet, dirty as it is, is a lot cleaner than the inside because Scientists also predict that by 2050 our oceans will be mostly plastic!
One thing you can say for us humans…and sadly perhaps the only consistent trait we’ve ever displayed…We sure know how to pollute, defile and otherwise desecrate a very pretty place… don’t we?
