As you read this, approximately 26,000 human-made objects are circling overhead around the Earth. Some 3,000 of them are functioning spacecraft and satellites; the other 23,000 are pieces of junk left over from 63 years of the human use of space. Literally millions of other, smaller pieces of human-caused space debris likely also exist but are too small to be identified by telescopes.
If the existence of this orbital debris field sounds like a problem to you, you’re right. But what kind of problem is it – technical, scientific, political? Well, all of these, but not only these. Our unconcern with the sustainability of how we use space is connected to larger issues (cultural, philosophical, moral) of how humans interact with the natural world as a whole.
These matters were the thrust of a fascinating conversation recorded on video last December between Aaron Boley, a UBC astrophysicist, and Moriba Jah, from the Department of Aerospace Engineering at University of Texas at Austin. The conversation was jointly hosted by UBC’s Green College and the Outer Space Institute.
Since both Aaron Boley and Moriba Jah have been Forum guests in the past, we are offering you this extremely interesting video, entitled Space Environmentalism, as our January Forum event.
You can view it at your leisure. The conversation is approximately an hour long. If you are concerned that matters of planetary orbits, trajectory tracking and so on may be more technical than you can absorb, don’t worry, Moriba Jah is the most dynamic and accessible speaker you could wish for.
Moriba Jah’s vision is also much broader than the pragmatic details of how things bump into each other overhead. Just wait till he starts speaking, roughly half-way through the conversation, about the connections between our use of space and Indigenous environmental knowledge.
When you’re done, we’d love to hear what you think of the issues raised by the conversation. Send us your thoughts and comments to forum@saltspringforum.com