Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb, and my name is Julie Douglas. Julie,
Speaker 1: you've been camping before, right, Yes, I have. So you
Speaker 1: know the deal. Leave no trades, right, leave nothing behind
Speaker 1: you bringing all your stuff, whether you're bringing in a
Speaker 1: backpack or a whole truckload of camping equipment, you need
Speaker 1: to leave with only your thing, taking only memories with you,
Speaker 1: and leaving no litter behind, right, I mean, that's that's
Speaker 1: the way it works. You don't just bury all your
Speaker 1: pots and pants and then market Well yeah, well, I mean, okay,
Speaker 1: if you're coming back at the same camping place, maybe
Speaker 1: you could make that argument. But okay, I see, I
Speaker 1: see a concept that you're coming up here. But the
Speaker 1: whole idea is that we want to be able to
Speaker 1: come back to that place and enjoy it in its
Speaker 1: natural form without having to put up with a bunch
Speaker 1: of litter and a bunch of garbage changing that environment. Now,
Speaker 1: we generinally don't have to worry though about that potter
Speaker 1: pan that Julie left behind at the campsite. Traveling at
Speaker 1: immense speeds like five miles per second and smashing through
Speaker 1: my crania right, clocking us in the head. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's just not a problem here at our campsites on Earth.
Speaker 1: But out there in the in the wild yonder it
Speaker 1: is a problem, right, which is directly tied to this
Speaker 1: idea of this big sky theory. Right, right, the big
Speaker 1: sky theory. I mean, the answer is in the words there,
Speaker 1: big sky. There's a lot of sky, There's a lot
Speaker 1: of space. It's huge. We couldn't possibly litter enough to
Speaker 1: make space junk a problem, right, That was the old
Speaker 1: way of looking at If you have a space mission
Speaker 1: to go up there, solar panel floats off, no big deal,
Speaker 1: there's plenty of room, some nuts and bolts fought in
Speaker 1: the pockets, no big deal. Satellites dead, and I just
Speaker 1: leave it there. This big sky theory, we can we
Speaker 1: can just leave everything wherever it happens to die and
Speaker 1: it'll never be a problem. It'll never come home to roost,
Speaker 1: this problem of space junk. Uh. But it is a
Speaker 1: problem that has come home to roost. NASA has tracked
Speaker 1: around on sixteen thousand bits of debris. That's a lot
Speaker 1: measuring over ten sent meters about four inches, but there
Speaker 1: are millions of smaller bits and pieces that are thought
Speaker 1: to be swarming up in the cosmos. And the more
Speaker 1: we've involved ourselves in orbit and an owner space, the
Speaker 1: more stuff we wind up with up there. Like just
Speaker 1: to look at sort of the timeline for this, if
Speaker 1: we look back at two thousand and five, we had
Speaker 1: a catalog of debris up there somewhere in the neighborhood
Speaker 1: of ten thousand pieces, and that's just stuff that we
Speaker 1: were tracking in New off Specifically, by two thousand ten,
Speaker 1: that number had reached fifteen thousand, so it's risen by
Speaker 1: five thousand pieces of space junk. And just that short
Speaker 1: amount of time, and fast forward to today, you have
Speaker 1: more and more players in the space game, involving themselves
Speaker 1: in the space game and taking that the big sky
Speaker 1: approach to space exploration. Well, especially when you get into
Speaker 1: the privatized territory as well, right, this becomes a real issue.
Speaker 1: The other issue is that space junk travels at speeds
Speaker 1: up to seventeen thousand, five hundred miles per hour, So
Speaker 1: that's fast enough for a tiny piece of debris to
Speaker 1: damage a satellite or spacecraft it's really big concerned or
Speaker 1: the International Space Station, which we will talk about later,
Speaker 1: can finentially set up a chain reaction where you have
Speaker 1: one pieces suddenly crashing into another and which causes debris
Speaker 1: to spiral out from that to hit other pieces. In
Speaker 1: many cases we're talking about dead objects hitting other pieces
Speaker 1: of garbage. But then what happens when this stuff collides
Speaker 1: with operative telecommunication satellites or exploratory missions or manned missions.
Speaker 1: You can see where this becomes a very dangerous problem
Speaker 1: very quickly. That's something called cascading collisions. This idea that
Speaker 1: things are slamming into each other and just creating more
Speaker 1: and more and more debris. So this has come home
Speaker 1: to roost. And let's talk about back in the day.
Speaker 1: Back in the seventies when this was just a theory,
Speaker 1: and a guy named Donald Kessler, who was assigned to
Speaker 1: the Environmental Effects Project Office at NASA's Johnson Space Center
Speaker 1: in Houston, became very interested in the craft that was
Speaker 1: abandoned and the void. Yeah, he wrote an important paper
Speaker 1: at the time. It's become more important over time. Originally
Speaker 1: he was having to really sort of shot on the
Speaker 1: mountain to get people to listen to him, But he
Speaker 1: wrote a paper called Collision Frequency of Artificial Satellites the
Speaker 1: Creation of a good rebelt, and his argument was that
Speaker 1: if we and this is early on, everyone else's seems
Speaker 1: to be sticking to this big sky theory. But Kessler says, look,
Speaker 1: if we don't start controlling this now, if we don't
Speaker 1: start mitigating the problem now, we are going to reach
Speaker 1: a point where we basically have a belt of debris
Speaker 1: around the planet. If you've ever seen the movie Wally,
Speaker 1: the depictions of Earth in that which the Earth is
Speaker 1: just so crowded with satellites that for anything to enter
Speaker 1: or exit Or's atmosphere they have to sort of move
Speaker 1: things out of the way. That's basically what he's talking about,
Speaker 1: except in his scenario, we reach a point with that
Speaker 1: to where we are stranded on Earth. Basically we are
Speaker 1: suddenly limited by what we can do and what we
Speaker 1: can explore in space. We kind of dig our own grave,
Speaker 1: you will, by just clotting our atmosphere with all of
Speaker 1: this junk. Yeah yeah, well not our atmosphere, but our uproar,
Speaker 1: right right, I mean, it does constrain our ability to
Speaker 1: explore the universe because it's kind of hard to launch
Speaker 1: something and then know that it's going to be taken
Speaker 1: out by a story piece of space junk. But he
Speaker 1: was basically saying, look, I estimate this to happen in
Speaker 1: the thirty to forty years. Now. This was alarming. It
Speaker 1: really was an eye opener. Even though people like our
Speaker 1: thirsty Clark, who actually conceived a communication satellite, had talked
Speaker 1: about this in the forties, I believe it was really
Speaker 1: Kessler who spent the time looking out at the Cosmos
Speaker 1: and looking through his telescope and saying, Okay, guys, this
Speaker 1: is this is real polity. This is a bigger problem
Speaker 1: than we thought. His vision of it was very apocular.
Speaker 1: Who was who's talking about like a new dark Age?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah he was. Yeah. He was actually saying that
Speaker 1: it would take a civilization down to the studs. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, he's fictioning it up a little bit, but
Speaker 1: maybe not too much. You know, that is the idea
Speaker 1: extrapolated to the denth degree. Right, you can take down
Speaker 1: on the communication satellites and you know, all this sort
Speaker 1: of technology that we do with today and our life
Speaker 1: is predicated on, and you could really sort of fold
Speaker 1: up humanity in the sense. But but we're we're not there.
Speaker 1: I do want to say that NASA set up the
Speaker 1: Orbital Debris Program Office in response to Cussler's paper, but
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna say it's a two. It was a
Speaker 1: toothless organization, but it wasn't It was didn't really seem
Speaker 1: like a big concern. It's like, oh, yeah, this could happen,
Speaker 1: and it's a theory, let's set a committee and uh,
Speaker 1: I mean you know how that yeah, yeah, and the
Speaker 1: guidelines they didn't really help to actually reduce space waste.
Speaker 1: So here we are, thirty years later, right on time,
Speaker 1: two thousand and nine, we have a couple of events
Speaker 1: that really usher in this idea that Kessler didn't just
Speaker 1: have a theory. It is a syndrome. And that's why
Speaker 1: it's called custlers. Yeah. February ten, two thousand nine, we
Speaker 1: had two satellites, Iridium thirty three, which is flying north
Speaker 1: relaying a phone conversations. And then there was this long
Speaker 1: retired Russian communication satellite called Cosmos and it's just tumbling
Speaker 1: east and an uncontrolled orbit. So you have an active
Speaker 1: satellite and an inactive satellite and then they collide. And
Speaker 1: this was not even a collision that was on the
Speaker 1: forecast because at this time we knew some of the
Speaker 1: stuff that was going on there and we can sort
Speaker 1: of excrapolate what might run into what what time. But
Speaker 1: this wasn't even scheduled to happen, if you will. They
Speaker 1: just ram into each other and of course just completely
Speaker 1: annihilate each other, and they create all these other pieces
Speaker 1: of debris. Right, they smashed into something like a two
Speaker 1: thousand one pieces. And this is over the Siberian tundra.
Speaker 1: And although it doesn't really affect us too much, I
Speaker 1: mean I think there's some drop calls from this one collision. Right,
Speaker 1: the fact of the matter is, again, this debris, this
Speaker 1: cloud of debris was created, and we know that that
Speaker 1: begets even more and more debris. And it was a
Speaker 1: big wake up call. And according to wire dot com
Speaker 1: Evan L. Schwartz great article in this he said that
Speaker 1: each chard an orbiting cannonball capable of destroying yet another
Speaker 1: hunk of high priced hardware. That's the real problem there, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean expense going into any of these satellites, communications
Speaker 1: or otherwise. So the idea that you just have junk
Speaker 1: up there that could conceivably just wipe it out. People
Speaker 1: suddenly started taking even more notice following this two thousand
Speaker 1: and nine event. Yep, So pretty soon in a military
Speaker 1: unit called the Space Surveillance Network was set up. They
Speaker 1: began to monitor the debris by They were looking at
Speaker 1: one thousand active satellites, three thousand, seven hundred inactive satellites
Speaker 1: and rocket pieces, and another fifteen thousand, three hundred objects
Speaker 1: the size of a fist or larger. And these numbers
Speaker 1: started to bear out this idea that we could have
Speaker 1: maybe seventy five collisions a day, and that doesn't include
Speaker 1: the half million smaller pieces of debris the size of
Speaker 1: a marble or larger, all of which is again capable
Speaker 1: of just wiping out satellites or you know, other things
Speaker 1: that are very valuable to us. Another key incident that happened,
Speaker 1: and this is just a few months after the Cosmos
Speaker 1: Iridium collision, and I think I imagine most of you
Speaker 1: remember this. I remember it because working here at how
Speaker 1: stuff works and anything news the inside I see that happens.
Speaker 1: We suddenly latch onto a bit and this was big
Speaker 1: news because two thousand nine, suddenly there's an object, piece
Speaker 1: of space junk headed towards the International Space Station. So
Speaker 1: this is an immensely expensive piece of equipment here. We're
Speaker 1: talking in excess of a hundred billion dollars worth of equipment,
Speaker 1: human beings on board, a lot invested in this. This
Speaker 1: is part of our space legacy moving forward. And there's
Speaker 1: a piece of junk headed towards it that could conceivably
Speaker 1: white it all out. So we have to rush everybody
Speaker 1: on board into essentially a lifeboat kind of a panic room,
Speaker 1: right yeah, because they're like, all right, we might miss us,
Speaker 1: but it might hit you, and if it hits us,
Speaker 1: we're gonna have to somehow save you, guys. So get
Speaker 1: into this lifeboat and want to see what happens. Now,
Speaker 1: Luckily it missed by a few miles, but it's still
Speaker 1: in the vasts of space. I mean, that's like shaving
Speaker 1: off a little piece of hair on your head there.
Speaker 1: And it was like a couple of months after that,
Speaker 1: another piece of space junk hurled towards the International Space Station,
Speaker 1: this time missing them by just a mile. And this
Speaker 1: frag meant would have had an impact equal to a
Speaker 1: truck bomb. In fact, I've got a quote here from
Speaker 1: Jack Bacon, he's a senior NASA scientist. He says, a
Speaker 1: ten centimeter sphere of aluminum would be like seven kilograms
Speaker 1: of T and T it would blow everything to smith rings.
Speaker 1: I mean, we can shield these things to a certain degree.
Speaker 1: There's a project at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston
Speaker 1: where they basically take chunks of plastic and basically space
Speaker 1: junk and they just fire them at shields and panels
Speaker 1: to see exactly what the damages. And they're able to determine.
Speaker 1: Within a certain size of space junk, they can sort
Speaker 1: of shield something out. But when you're getting these larger pieces,
Speaker 1: it becomes increasingly impossible to create a space vessel or
Speaker 1: a satellite. They could withstand that kind of damage, right, right,
Speaker 1: especially when you're talking about delicate of material such as
Speaker 1: solar of cells. Yeah, and just to give everybody an
Speaker 1: idea too, I mean we're talking again. I think you
Speaker 1: talked about this, some tools or some nuts and bolts,
Speaker 1: that kind of space junk to the size of rocket stages,
Speaker 1: the size of school buses. There's an immense variety of
Speaker 1: based junk up there. Now. One might ask doesn't all
Speaker 1: this stuff eventually just fall into the Earth's atmosphere and
Speaker 1: burn up, because that was part of the big sky
Speaker 1: theory as well, that all right, if we'll leave something
Speaker 1: up there, it's not gonna be a problem. And b
Speaker 1: it's eventually just going to drift down and re enter
Speaker 1: the Earth atmosphere and probably burn up and or land
Speaker 1: in the middle of nowhere or more likely in the
Speaker 1: middle of the ocean somewhere, which is what most reinering does. Occasionally,
Speaker 1: something will fall on somebody's backyard and it's a local
Speaker 1: news story, front page for the next five years. But
Speaker 1: for the most part, yes, that's true, it just falls
Speaker 1: in the middle of nowhere. But it can take decades
Speaker 1: for something in orbit to actually re enter the atmosphere,
Speaker 1: which is why you still have some of the original
Speaker 1: satellites that went up there. I mean, they're all still
Speaker 1: up there and again, and not all of them burn
Speaker 1: up upon re entry, right, because it depends on the size, right, Right,
Speaker 1: depends on the size of rocket stage. The size of
Speaker 1: school bus isn't necessarily going to burn up there. So
Speaker 1: we're gonna take a quick break and when we get back,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about this idea of how we
Speaker 1: can in teen space junk and getting our janitorial services
Speaker 1: up there and taking care of it. All Right, we're back.
Speaker 1: I want to throw out another quick fact. This is
Speaker 1: from the Wired article you mentioned earlier. But nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: two that's when the kel Star one satellite relaid the
Speaker 1: first phone call and TV signals across the Atlantic and
Speaker 1: ended up failing the next year. So nine three this
Speaker 1: thing dies. It's still up there, just up there doing nothing,
Speaker 1: just a big piece of space junk floating around. And
Speaker 1: and in the decades since, of course, we've rolled out
Speaker 1: more and more stuff. Just to give you a little
Speaker 1: idea about how we end up with that huge number
Speaker 1: of fifteen thousand plot well, now it's up to sixteen
Speaker 1: thousand pieces of space jump. Yeah. I mean it's really
Speaker 1: hard to actually keep tabs on anyway, because, as we
Speaker 1: talked about, it's you know, you have some particles that
Speaker 1: are so small that you can't even really engage them
Speaker 1: or track them. I should say. Another incident that kind
Speaker 1: of woke everyone up to the dangers and the problems
Speaker 1: posted by space Junk of January eleven, two thousand seven,
Speaker 1: the Chinese government stayed this demonstration of its military might
Speaker 1: by basically shooting down or not really shooting down, but
Speaker 1: blowing up one of its retired satellites with something called
Speaker 1: a kinetic kill vehicle, so to demonstrate that they had
Speaker 1: the potential to take out a satellite, which in a
Speaker 1: military scenario would be very valuable if you satellite our
Speaker 1: keys to tall communication networks, to our ability to get
Speaker 1: strategic information about what an enemy is doing. And they
Speaker 1: were demonstrating, yes, we can take these out satellite killing technology.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's that's been on the military playlist for
Speaker 1: some time now. But they demonstrate this. They blow up
Speaker 1: this old satellite. Big deal, right, They're just shooting some
Speaker 1: junk in the backyard. There are people out in the
Speaker 1: sticks that do that every day. But when they shot
Speaker 1: this thing, it blasted into three thousand trackable pieces. That's
Speaker 1: just trackable pieces, but three thousands. So one military demonstration later,
Speaker 1: that number we have that tally of measurable space junk
Speaker 1: up there rises by three thousand pieces. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it was a total jerk move. I mean it's really irresponsible,
Speaker 1: knowing what we know to a certain degree now. But
Speaker 1: the problem with this is six percent of the pieces
Speaker 1: have re entered the atmosphere. And here's the interesting thing.
Speaker 1: Half of those pieces came down in the last twelve months,
Speaker 1: and this has to do with increased solar activity, which
Speaker 1: normally we kind of it's not something we get really
Speaker 1: excited about in terms of like, yeah, increased solar activity.
Speaker 1: This idea of solar maximum or peak activity could actually
Speaker 1: be a boon to us in terms of cleaning up
Speaker 1: space junk. Right, the Sun, as we've mentioned before, is
Speaker 1: pumping out energy. It's pumping out energy of the Earth,
Speaker 1: and some of this is shielded by our electromagnetic field,
Speaker 1: but the rest of it actually reaches the Earth. Powers
Speaker 1: the Earth gives us a lot of the stuff we need,
Speaker 1: and if we have all the space junk floating around
Speaker 1: out there, an increase in that solar activity can stir
Speaker 1: things up a bit. Yeah. In fact, if we've got
Speaker 1: these solar players in these kernal mass ejections, which by
Speaker 1: the way, when I talk about this solar maximum, this
Speaker 1: peak activity is eleven year period that is going to
Speaker 1: come to fruition in I believe in terms of the
Speaker 1: ultimate amount of solar activity. So I think of it
Speaker 1: as blasting the atmosphere with heat with these solar players
Speaker 1: and coronal mass ejections from you know, sort of raining
Speaker 1: upon the Earth's atmosphere. This causes the atmosphere to expand,
Speaker 1: and this expansion pushes some of the gas to higher altitudes,
Speaker 1: which creates drag on orbiting space debris that causes it
Speaker 1: to slow down. And then as the debris slows down
Speaker 1: or gravity pulls it to the lower altitudes where the
Speaker 1: atmosphere is even thicker. So then you get even more drag, right,
Speaker 1: and then you get slower debris. So eventually debris re
Speaker 1: enters the atmosphere sooner than it would without the solar influence.
Speaker 1: And here's here's the good news. It burns up safely
Speaker 1: for the most part. So that's why we've seen such
Speaker 1: an influx of that Chinese satellite that those pieces coming in.
Speaker 1: So there's this idea that the Sun could actually be
Speaker 1: very helpful at least until when it when it reaches
Speaker 1: its peak capacity or maximum output in the eleven year
Speaker 1: period and helping us to keep taps on this of it. Okay,
Speaker 1: so we're keeping tabs, we've been keeping tabs. Occasionally the
Speaker 1: Sun might accidentally help out sort of solar hoovering. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but what else are we doing, right, that's the big question.
Speaker 1: We can exercise a little bit of forethought in the
Speaker 1: way we plan missions and uh, you know, moving forward.
Speaker 1: But there's still a lot of junk up there. What
Speaker 1: are we doing give anything to clean it up? Well,
Speaker 1: there's something called the Swiss Janitor satellite. This comes to
Speaker 1: us from the Swiss Space Center at EPFL and that's
Speaker 1: the launch of the clean Space one. This was back
Speaker 1: in February, I believe, and it's a project that developed
Speaker 1: and built the first installment of a family of what
Speaker 1: they see as satellites that are especially designed to clean
Speaker 1: up space debris. And the idea is to launch a
Speaker 1: small grabber spacecraft to chase after orbiting pieces of space junk,
Speaker 1: and then it'll attach itself to it de orbit and
Speaker 1: the whole Incholado then re enters the atmosphere where it
Speaker 1: burns up on re entry. There are a few other
Speaker 1: plans to that involve basically micro satellites are many satellites
Speaker 1: that around and essentially net this stuff up and kind
Speaker 1: of form like not really a Katamari ball, but they
Speaker 1: form a nice big sack of space traction then bring
Speaker 1: it back to the atmosphere to Another tactic that we've
Speaker 1: been using is making sure that we take retiring spacecraft
Speaker 1: up to a graveyard orbit so that we know they're
Speaker 1: going out of commission. Well, let's move them into an
Speaker 1: orbit where they're not going to be interfering with anything.
Speaker 1: It's actually active, okay, So just sort of pushing it
Speaker 1: away from us a little bit more, right in the
Speaker 1: same way that you move your junk car into the
Speaker 1: backyard as opposed to leaving it in the front yard.
Speaker 1: It's still there, you just can't see it from the
Speaker 1: street right right, house values go up. There's this idea
Speaker 1: of using little puffs of gas that I kind of like.
Speaker 1: It's just from a team from the University of Michigan,
Speaker 1: and they're thinking about using pulses of gas fired into
Speaker 1: the path of debris and this would increase again the
Speaker 1: drag on orbiting space junk, leaving it to plunge downward
Speaker 1: into the Earth's atmosphere, and the pulses themselves would leave
Speaker 1: no no trace. So there we get our our boy
Speaker 1: scouts creta there, and it also leaves no solid material
Speaker 1: in orbit. Another really interesting tactic that NASA is pretty
Speaker 1: excited about comes from Tether's Unlimited. This is a Seattle
Speaker 1: area space contractor and they've been working on this idea
Speaker 1: for years. But their idea is to create this thing
Speaker 1: called a wrestler, which is a mid sized vehicle about
Speaker 1: four hundred pounds, and it piggybacks a ride on other satellites.
Speaker 1: So it so the idea here is, let's cut some corners.
Speaker 1: It'll just hit your ride with some sort of big
Speaker 1: price e corporat or national supported telecommunication satellite launch or
Speaker 1: or mission launch. And then once up there, it's saying
Speaker 1: to pull off this really neat tethering technique. So it
Speaker 1: goes into orbit and it sidles up to this piece
Speaker 1: of space junk and it detaches an electrodynamic tether. This
Speaker 1: is a wire mesh tail. It's up to six miles long,
Speaker 1: and then it shoots an amp of current through that
Speaker 1: material and this current interacts with the Earth's magnetic field,
Speaker 1: producing a drag effect that lowers the debris towards the
Speaker 1: atmosphere and re entry. Yeah, and that one's really cool
Speaker 1: because that seems pretty promising in the perspective of gathering
Speaker 1: up debris, but not only that, just being able to
Speaker 1: afford it. I think that was estimated somewhere in the
Speaker 1: tens of millions whereas some of the other ideas and
Speaker 1: projects we're talking in the billions. Yeah, they're saying this
Speaker 1: one would just to do a test mission, mind you,
Speaker 1: that would take out a few tons of trash, would
Speaker 1: be tens of millions of dollars, which which again puts
Speaker 1: this whole problem into perspective. Like like so many problems
Speaker 1: that humans get themselves into on a personal or national scale,
Speaker 1: you don't work on a problem early enough, it ends
Speaker 1: up costing you far more later on, and it reaches
Speaker 1: a point where you have to either pay that bill
Speaker 1: or just be content with sticking where you are. Well.
Speaker 1: And this is the kind of problem too, is just
Speaker 1: like your house if you don't necessarily want to put
Speaker 1: all your money into, you know, redoing the roof, but
Speaker 1: you have to write because otherwise you're going to be
Speaker 1: explicit to the elements. But that's not the cool thing
Speaker 1: you see from the street. Same thing with Nassa's like,
Speaker 1: that's not our flashy cool stuff. It really do need
Speaker 1: to take care of the space chunk. The problem is
Speaker 1: that they don't necessarily have a gigantic budget in the
Speaker 1: first place, and it's certainly not something that they have
Speaker 1: dedicated to this problem in the budget from last year,
Speaker 1: they started the four thousand dollar research grants to try
Speaker 1: to look into this, and that idea that you just
Speaker 1: talked about was was in there and very viable. So
Speaker 1: it's just a question about of when and how many
Speaker 1: dollars are gonna lay down here, and then it's a
Speaker 1: question of exponential numbers here. Again, this is from Evan L. Schwartz,
Speaker 1: he says, and this is the Wired article waste management.
Speaker 1: He says, it's proliferations based junk threatens not only current
Speaker 1: in future space missions, but also global communications, mobile phone networks,
Speaker 1: satellite television, radio broadcasts, weather tracking, military surveillance, even the
Speaker 1: dashboard GPS devices that keep us from getting lost. The
Speaker 1: number of manufactured objects cluttering the sky is now expected
Speaker 1: to double every few years as large objects weaken and
Speaker 1: split apart, and new collisions create more castlerian debris leading
Speaker 1: to yet more collisions. So it's kind of a runaway
Speaker 1: environment here. Yeah, and like we said before, it affects
Speaker 1: modern life on so many levels. I mean telecommunications certainly,
Speaker 1: space exploration, but national security. Just again, our entire tell
Speaker 1: communications network, it is growing to depend on these satellites.
Speaker 1: Now you could argue, I guess that if we had
Speaker 1: a completely garbaged up orbit, if we had this good
Speaker 1: rebout going on, then that it would be harder for
Speaker 1: say like a vampire spaceship to drift into our atmosphere
Speaker 1: and cause problems, or the or the head of a
Speaker 1: planet sized transformer. Um, you know, good luck getting into
Speaker 1: our junk up atmosphere and causing trouble for the denizens
Speaker 1: of Earth. But on the other hand, we we might
Speaker 1: be trapped in this dark age that Clark warned us about.
Speaker 1: It's possible, But I mean, I think that the fact
Speaker 1: that it's come to life and it's now a priority,
Speaker 1: and that people are realizing that space junk may drop
Speaker 1: in your backyard if it's not under control pretty soon
Speaker 1: as a problem. Yeah. And if I know anything about
Speaker 1: the human species, once we know that there's a problem
Speaker 1: and we know that we've been causing it, we're really
Speaker 1: good about fixing it and addressing it. So I think
Speaker 1: you're right. Let's be optimistic about this. Okay, now, now
Speaker 1: you're just being facetious. Let's just put that out there
Speaker 1: on the line, all right, So there you go, space drunk,
Speaker 1: Let's work on it. Let's come up with some ideas.
Speaker 1: All right, I'm gonna have the robots stay in his
Speaker 1: closet right now and not bring us out any of
Speaker 1: our listener mail. So he has a bunch of it,
Speaker 1: and I'm just gonna mention two quick things. First of all,
Speaker 1: the Stuff to Blow your Kid's Mind video series. It
Speaker 1: is live. We are linking to it. By the time
Speaker 1: you hear this, it will have been live for a
Speaker 1: week or so. Check it out ten episodes. In each episode,
Speaker 1: Julie and I tackle a different science experiment that you
Speaker 1: and or your child can try at home. We will
Speaker 1: walk you through the basics of these different scientific properties,
Speaker 1: ranging from volcanism to magnetism. You just go through it
Speaker 1: from the personal perspective in the experiment, through the larger
Speaker 1: world based experien ants, and then discuss how this connect
Speaker 1: us to the cosmos. So the idea is, as the
Speaker 1: title suggests, to blow your kid's mind or blow the
Speaker 1: mind of the child and you. So check it out.
Speaker 1: We're really proud of it and think it's a fine product. Also,
Speaker 1: if you have really cool photos that you have taken,
Speaker 1: something that blows your mind that it exists or exists
Speaker 1: in the way that you've captured it on film, share
Speaker 1: that with the world. Check out the Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: Your Mind photo contest. It's an upload tool. You can
Speaker 1: upload your cool photo under various categories, including stuff like
Speaker 1: gross and awesome. Upload that stuff, vote on your and
Speaker 1: other images. You might even get to win an iPad.
Speaker 1: What Yeah, can I upload something? No? Well, no, you
Speaker 1: can upload something, just don't expect to win, all right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but still, I mean the fun thing about it is
Speaker 1: just seeing these images and yeah, yeah, as if, this
Speaker 1: recording is in its early stages, so there's still a
Speaker 1: lot of images coming in, and I'm just I check
Speaker 1: it out every day because I'm excited to see what
Speaker 1: kind of stuff is going to show up there. There's
Speaker 1: some really funny stuff shotting up. Well yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: not just stuff that will knock your socks off, make
Speaker 1: you reevaluate, you know, reality around you, but some some
Speaker 1: good animal fun l L stuff. Yeah. And if you
Speaker 1: upload something onto that feature that is related to a
Speaker 1: podcast that we've recorded, share it on our Facebook account
Speaker 1: and we'll we'll throw some votes at it, We'll spread
Speaker 1: the word. So if you want to find us on Facebook,
Speaker 1: we are Stuff to Blow your Mind on there. Just
Speaker 1: search for it there, and if you want to find
Speaker 1: us on Twitter, we are Blow the Mind and you
Speaker 1: can always drop us a line at blew the Mind
Speaker 1: at Discovery dot com. Be sure to check out our
Speaker 1: new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff
Speaker 1: Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing
Speaker 1: possibilities of tomorrow.