This image, taken on August 10, 2022, shows the results of a stacked set of images of the same region of sky, the nebula Sharpless 150 (SH2–150), taken over a single night. The streaks result from satellites passing through this one field-of-view over the course of one night alone. (Credit: Fegato/Cloudy Nights)

Even outer space now succumbs to human pollution

In 1957, humanity launched our first satellite; today’s number is nearly 10,000, with 500,000+ more planned. Space is no longer pristine.

All throughout the history of humanity, we’ve had to reckon with the need to extract resources from our environment — food, water, materials for tools and shelter, etc. — while simultaneously avoiding polluting it to such an extent that we could no longer live there: a fate that many living organisms suffer from. The sizes of societies were limited, historically, by the ability to bring sufficiently large stores of fresh water in (until the development of technologies such as the aqueduct), and then by the ability to remove the waste products produced by the humans that inhabited them (until the development of sewers). In more recent times, we’ve had to concern ourselves with:

• producing enough food and distributing it to where people are,
• keeping the air we breathe clean enough to avoid poisoning our lungs and other organs,
• and keeping the water we drink clean enough to avoid serious illness.

Even as countless generations of humans faced problems such as these, there was always one place we could look to that was free of the pollutants…