As much as I love people on an individual level, I hate them all on a more global scale. Our civilization sux. And the ones that were before us, it seems, weren’t any better. I’ve been thinking a lot about this, but this post on Slashdot made me blog about it. It’s about space junk.
One hundred years is a barely noticable period of time, when speaking about universe, space, and planets. But we, humans, haven’t been off our planet even for so long. Barely half of that time. And we have already put so much junk in space around our planet, that it becomes the problem of our own.
According to NASA officials, the amount of stuff we’ve put into LEO (Low Earth Orbit) is at critical levels.
We probably haven’t even developed a way to collect all that crap yet, but we are putting so much of it out like we aren’t planning to fly around our own planet no more. I wonder how much time it will take for Greenpeace to extend it’s efforts into space…
On a larger scale, I think, our attitude towards environment will kill us. And maybe, maybe the next civilization will be slightly better in this regard.
Your post reminded me one of the anime series called “planete”, about garbage collectors on the orbit in 2075, since the space can’t be easily explored due to the danger of hitting any of it.
Dear Leonid, I feel this is a really serious problem and a couple of years back I thought abuot it a lot. But its very hard, for example can we avoid using plastic… our entire software industry is based on media like disposable CDs etc which are made of NON-BIODEGRADEABLE plastic! The list is long and endless.
My biggest concern is: how are we going to answer the next generation… when the kids grow up and inherit the planet from us they’re going to ask us “why are you handing off such a dirty planet to us” :( and I don’t have an answer…
The only way to avoid the question so far seems to be teaching our kids about taboo questions. Things that should never be asked. One of them is “why the planet is a crap dump, daddy?”…
I totaly agree with the initial statement of the post. All the excuses, such as we can’t leave without plastic bags for rubish bin, is a crap. We use the cheapest and most convinient way to satisfy our needs and least of all we think about the Earth. I read even some economical theory about the polution: the market force is effective in preventing excessive pollution by imposing higher and higher marginal cost, called externaltities, for each next cubic tonn of CO2. Bullshit. People tolerate everything because they are detached from the nature and have no idea about consequences, apart from what they might get from TV, thanks to BBC.
Bravo DimonF – nicely said.