Imagine yourself on a chill, relaxing night, camping on top of the mountain. You look up at the night sky, and what do you see? Perhaps you thought of a beautiful scene of stars twinkling in the night sky. How lovely. But now, replace the stars with trash, and you get a horrifying scene. This is the reality of Low Earth Orbit. Beyond the atmosphere are hundreds of thousands of satellites circling the Earth, with millions more pieces of trash we call “space junk.”

Space junk, also called space debris, is any artificial object in space that no longer serves a useful purpose. This includes dead satellites, parts of rocket stages, and fragments from the intentional destruction or collision of satellites.

Today, Earth’s orbit is getting crowded; 9000 satellites share their orbit with millions of deadly debris. According to NASA, satellites, if struck by debris even as small as “the size of a grain”, will instantly shatter into pieces (NASA, "Space Debris and Human Spacecraft”). And Low Earth Orbit is not in shortage of this deadly debris -- according to the European Space Agency, there are currently 130 million pieces of space debris ranging from size of 1 mm to 1 cm (ESA, “Space Environment Statistics”). Every single one of these debris has can remain in orbits for decades and collide with other objects to create even more debris.

A study by NASA found that, by the end of 2035, low Earth orbit collisions are expected to occur at the rate of “a handful of events per year." This may not seem like a lot. But at one point, a single piece of debris can cause a cascade of collisions until the entire population of space infrastructure is decimated. Collision after collision, until all we have left over, is a planet surrounded by trash. This process is what we call the Kessler syndrome.

But by now, you’re probably wondering: yeah that sounds scary, but why should I care?

Well, the thing is, we’ve covered our planet with millions of bullets, but we’ve also put a vital component of our global infrastructure -- satellites -- right in the danger zone. Despite being hundreds or even thousands of miles above us, satellites permeate almost every aspect of our lives. Important services such as navigation systems, weather forecasts, disaster management, and air traffic control all rely on satellites.

So imagine a world where all satellites suddenly disappeared. You would have a hard time traversing to new places due to the loss of GPS. Meanwhile, over the ocean, thousands of pilots struggle to talk to air traffic control. This is the future we are looking at, if the problem of space debris is not addressed.

Our infrastructure, our safety, and our daily lives all depend on satellites.

Furthermore, space exploration will become incredibly dangerous, if not impossible. Imagine all the incredible knowledge about our home planet, our universe, that we will never have the chance to discover because we’ve polluted the space around us.

Fortunately, we still have some time before life as we know will be gone forever.

Space debris may seem like a far-off issue, but the truth is, it affects literally everyone on Earth. And we can’t solve a problem if no one cares about it. So write to your representatives about your concern for space debris, we must garner public support, and show that we care, in order to incentivize the governments to fund the development of debris removal technology and pass laws that would help prevent the creation of space debris.

Space technology is the key to improving our lives on Earth and the Earth’s orbit is our gateway to exploring the universe. Let’s keep our night skies clean by cleaning up space junk.