this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2024
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This is both cool and scary.
A few years ago, I was walking my dog at night just after sunset and looked up as I normally do to star gaze. My eyes caught a glimpse of a fast moving dot moving across the sky. I was getting the ISS reminders at the time and had none for the day, so I opened up Sky Guide and used the gyro feature to identify it. The dot happened to be an old Soviet rocket from the 1950s.
This opened up a different way of thinking about how much we’re tossing into the sky, and if objects are still floating by some 70 years later, what will our sky look like in another 70 with the accelerated launches we have today.
The advancements we’ve made as a human race is amazing, but quite scary at the same time.
Or, looked at another way: everything we've ever thrown in the ocean... Is still in the ocean. Space junk seems unique because it is moving. But really we've been discarding crap wherever for all of human history.
Absolutely a fair point and I thank you for mentioning it. I hope through our continued evolution, we learn to stop polluting our surroundings.
Including most of the first stages for the aforementioned rockets, which were much larger than the upper stages.
I’ve always figured that if one day there is a star trek like civilization cruising the galaxy, they’ll come up on our dead planet, see all the shit floating around and say something insightful about the great filter and blip on out of there.
Honestly I think "civilization" is the great filter.
Of course this is just pure conjecture, but it seems that once you're past a hunter-gatherer society, you're going to have much more capacity for changing and damaging your environment than you do for understanding the damage you're causing, and I'm not entirely convinced there's a way to run a highly technological society without consuming more resources than are strictly available. or inventing nuclear weapons which are a real Pandora's box. Then add to that the tendency of evolution to produce pretty cutthroat species, which seem like they'd be more successful at prevailing over the less aggressive ones.
I think it's just more likely for technologically advanced societies to eventually fuck themselves over by either using up their resources, or just straight-up destroying themselves in some pointless war or another
That actually sums up my view pretty accurately as well. I’ve tried to look back and see where the overall path could have changed. Even if you were to hypothetically remove oil from existence, we were still well on our way to wiping out whales and other fatty sea mammals for the same purposes.
As to the evolutionary pressures leading to cutthroat species, yeah I think that’s exactly what it is. By the time a world altering species can begin to see beyond itself and think holistically about its environment it has already done so much damage.
Random tangent- I highly recommend the Children of Time trilogy from Adrian Tchaikovsky if you’re into sci fi. I describe it as evolutionary biology sci fi, and eventually it goes into kind of a ‘what is consciousness/what is living’ bend. Took a little to get used to the structure of the first book, but man that first one especially I dug.
And it's not that some members of those species won't see the problems just like many of us meatbags have for a loooong time now, but that on average it won't be nearly widespread enough to make a difference before shit really hits the fan.
Oh and thank you for the book tip! I don't think I've ever read any of Adrian's stuff even though I am a huge sci-fi nerd. The description in the book's wiki article definitely makes it sound like my thing