1000 Flowers for the Planet - #313 Clean Up Space Waste

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #313 Clean Up Space Waste

Would you consider it a good idea to take all your household waste, and instead of putting it out for the garbage collector, scatter it around the perimeter of your house? Keep doing this for a few years, leaving a gap to enter and exit through of course (doh! it would be silly not to), then decide how sustainable this action would be. Yes. That was a stupid idea, wasn’t it!?

Now think about the 300,000 plus pieces of waste that are floating in space around earth, accumulating there since the space race of post World War 2 began less than 70 years ago. This planet has been in existence for millions of years yet it takes the ‘intelligent’ human race less than one century to trash space around our planet. Instead of spending trillions of dollars trying to find water on the moon, how about we clean up the water we already have here? Instead of trying to find other planets to colonise, how about we stop trashing the one we already have? If we’re going to explore space, let’s find ways of doing it without trashing the space around our planet and be clever enough to ensure all pieces of equipment are returned to the earth for reuse. Let’s also insist on cleaning up the mess that has already been left in space. Furthermore, let’s ask governments to explain what they’re doing and why before spending so much money on trashing space. Or is there an elephant in the room?