How many times did I tell you to stop leaving your toys all over the floor!? Sorry, I meant orbit:
First of all, congratulations to India for launching 104 satellites in one shot. Congratulations also to the various organizations that will advance science through the various experiments on board them satellites. However…
I have said it in the past^ as well. We’re being careless with our orbital activities. It’s not only our forests and seas that we’re spoiling, but also our lovely planet’s orbital space. And like the environment down here, there’s only one up there and once we’ve ruined it, it’ll take a long time to fix.
Sure, there’s a lot more space up there, even if we only consider close Earth orbit. But if we keep launching our tech-junk with little foresight one day we might get hit by the nasty Kessler syndrome^, and then we’ll see decades of technological progress thrown out the window, not to mention it’ll be very difficult for anything to leave Earth until we clean the mess up. At least it’ll be some measure of defense against alien immigrants?
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