4.27.2008

Clutter

I have always had a problem with hording keepsakes and mistakenly thinking that this item or that doodad will come in handy at a later time. About two months ago I was able to do away with a lot of those things, keeping only those items I absolutely could not part with. I'm not alone in having that problem though. A large portion of us have closets or boxes full of things that, if we really thought about it, didn't need. Space is no exception.

We've been flinging satellites up into orbit for decades now and even jettisoned rocket boosters from shuttle launches hang out up there too. There was this Japanese anime that I watched for a while called "Cowboy Bebop" that told the story of three interplanetary bounty hunters. It was a really well written show in a noir style. In one episode they focused on Earth and it's inability to contain life due to all of the space garbage that would rain down on earth each day. The shape of the continents would be altered each time one of these pieces of debris impacted the planet, some leaving small, smoldering holes while others left giant craters. The amount of space to fly around in Earth's orbit was even difficult to maneuver in due to all the satellites, garbage from space stations, and whatever other waste humans left out there.

Why do we keep so much garbage around us that we have no use for? I recall a problem a month ago with an object that was threatening to fall out of orbit that contained radioactive material that had to be shot out of the sky. How many more of these will we have to deal with in the next decade? Did the rocket scientists neglect to think of ways to dispose of these things once they were past their operating dates?

I was poking around on the Internet and just happened to come across these images that sparked this entire thought process. It appears that all those people who once thought Earth was the center of the Universe have been proven correct. Except that this Universe consists of garbage.

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