In 1965, during the first American space walk, astronaut Edward White lost his glove.
This glove gloried in the fact of it becoming one of the first pieces of space litter, orbiting the earth at a speed of 28,000 kmph (I’d like a glove as well-traveled as that!).
Today, there are around 110,000 objects floating around earth. Things like satellites, paint flakes, nuts and bolts, and probably even large blocks of frozen urine (compliments of the cosmonauts on the Mir Space Station).
Moreover, I’ve just read that a piece of space debris the size of a coin moves so fast that it has the destructive force of a bus traveling at full speed. Imagine that. With the satellites we are producing, costing something around US$250 million (not including the launching, mind you), a collision can be expensive.
What is funny is how we have decided to cope with this problem. One British company has invented Snap I, some sort of space garbage collector if you will, a miniature satellite that collects space debris to push it back towards the earth. I don’t see the use of this : theoretically, space debris should burn up in the earth’s atmosphere. But surprisingly, some do make it back to earth. One piece a day, even, on average.
Something for you to think about. Bic produces 9 million razors and 4 million lighters a day. This company started with just one product in 1949: the disposable ball-point pen. To this day 14 million pens are sold in around 150 countries in ONE DAY. 14 million disposable ballpoint pens. (“I shudder at the immense proportions”). I ask you: what can be done with the plastic casings once a pen runs out of ink?
In Bangkok, Thailand, these casings are used to make improvised heroin syringes. In other countries, they are transformed into crack cocaine pipes. Unhealthy recycling. Ooomph.
What about chopsticks? In Japan, it takes 15,000 trees a year to make waribashi (disposable chopsticks). Almost a quarter to make these delightful chopsticks are taken from tropical rain forests.
That’s not a good thing. But at least they’re biodegradable.
How saddening it is to think of garbage: all around, even in space. Sometimes, I think we’re forever trying to clean up after the mess we make : an eternal mess we create throughout our lives. Things we throw away are always thrown back to our faces. How do we expect to clean up space debris when we can’t even keep track of things down here? An impossible feat, you say? I don’t know. I don’t even know why we think that we’re so important… Mother Nature will go on evolving and breathing even without humans. Compared to the Universe, we’re cosmic glitches.
But important cosmic glitches.
I’ve seen a poster about recycling yesterday with the caption: “We should all give a fuck.”
So true.
