[RT] At least 170 million pieces of rapidly-moving space junk are now circulating in Earth’s orbit and this debris may even lead to a "catastrophic avalanche of collisions" and destroy all working satellites and even threaten economies, scientists said.Some people have no idea how big a globe of twenty five thousand miles diameter is (196.9 million mi² just off the top of Google's head.) The fact that satellites have to be positioned up from the surface adds another couple or three hundred miles. So that's space for how many satellites, boys and girls, assuming each gets a square mile of overhead room?
"The space junk problem has been getting worse every year," head of Australia's Space Environment Research Centre, Ben Greene, told AFP.
"Terrible! Just terrible!"
Some 170 million pieces of debris or ’space junk’ are currently orbiting Earth and only 22,000 are tracked, said Greene, who’s currently hosting a conference among international space scientists in Canberra.
There have been about 8000 man made objects launched into space - only a handful left Earth orbit. Some have decayed and reentered. There are about 3000 satellites currently in orbit. Of course, that's just Google's opinion and you know how they lie.
"We're losing three or four satellites a year now to space debris collision. We're very close, NASA estimates, of within five to 10 years of losing everything," Greene said, adding that "a catastrophic avalanche of collisions which could quickly destroy all orbiting satellites is now possible."
"And then three thousand satellites and 170 million other rocks and bits of dust and dust rags and buckets and mops will fall on our heads!"
Some people have no idea how big "up" is, possibly because it's unimaginably big, possibly because they're dumb.