When We Can't See the Stars | Throw Forward Thursday 188
For thousands of years, every generation has looked up at the same night sky. The same stars our ancestors used to navigate oceans, mark seasons, and tell their stories. We might be the last generation who sees them clearly. In August 2026, an abandoned 4-ton SpaceX booster crashed into the Moon. The 11th human-made object we know of to hit it since the 1990s. Nobody planned it. Space junk has to go somewhere. Right now there are thousands of satellites in orbit. Soon there will be hundreds of thousands, then millions, most of them up there so a few more people get better Wi-Fi. Three things follow from that, and all three are already starting: Debris falls back to Earth, and some of it survives the atmosphere and lands on people and property. Working satellites, the ones running GPS, communications, and one day carrying astronauts, get taken out by the junk drifting around them. And the night sky fills with so much moving light that our children and grandchildren might look up and see only satellites where the constellations used to be. We treated our rivers and oceans as somewhere to dump things until the mess was too big to fix. We're about to do the same to the sky above our heads. The time to write the rules on liability and clean-up is now, while it's still a problem we're able to solve. This week's Throw Forward Thursday is about what we lose if we look away, and what we protect if we act. What would you tell a child who asks why the sky is full of satellites and empty of stars? More info available at: https://futurism.com/space/scientists-warn-new-satellites-eye-damage https://www.instagram.com/p/DbrYFz-iNr3/ Episode 40: https://youtu.be/QkYR8x_N1VI Episode 23: https://youtu.be/11puRmR9c_4 Episode 127: https://youtu.be/3BvGdY9GrO8
