Space Junk Is Invisibly Polluting Earth, And We Only Just Found Out
www.sciencealert.com
Even the space junk designed with disposal in mind is a polluting presence around Earth, a new study has found. Those chunks of rocket and space station and dead satellites that burn up on atmospheric reentry leave miniscule traces of metal lingering...
  • Peppycito@sh.itjust.works
    522·
    1 year ago

    I’ve been thinking about this for a while. All these starlink satellites are ^just going to burn up on reentry. That’s like throwing tv’s into the bonfire and saying “don’t worry, they burn”

    • xkforce@lemmy.world
      217·
      1 year ago

      Every day multiple tons of micrometeoroids burn up on entry. So yeah there is a reason why no one really gave a shit when the occasional satellite burns up.

      • Cruxifux@lemmy.worldEnglish
        357·
        1 year ago

        For the millionth time, artificial pollutants are not the same as natural ones. They create different chemical reactions that cause different things to happen to our environments. And just because something occurs regularly in nature does not mean it’s okay to add to it and expect everything to turn out the same. Forest fires occurring naturally doesn’t mean we are fine to tear down the rainforest. Volcanoes going off and putting carbon into the atmosphere doesn’t mean we have no affect on the environment when we put pollutants in the atmosphere. And just because meteorites burn up in the atmosphere doesn’t mean space junk we’ve thrown up there has no effect. I’m so sick of seeing this shit man.

        • xkforce@lemmy.world
          103·
          1 year ago

          The amount of pollution matters and I can think of a dozen human sources of the same types of pollution that should garner more attention. Oil spills, burning plastics and tires, slash and burn agriculture, illegal dumping, all the poisonous shit people threw in the landfill the list goes on and on. Articles like this that ignore the relative scale of things unintentionally shift peoples’ focus away from the most damaging sources of pollution toward less significant ones which makes it more likely that the main causes of pollution arent dealt with.

          So is space junk burning up bad for the environment? Yeah technically. Should other sources be worried about more? Yes. One tanker ship burning dirt cheap high Sulfur fuel will fuck up the environment a lot more and theyre essentially unregulated. Theyre allowed to spew pollution equivalent to millions of cars and nothing is done about it.

        • arin@lemmy.worldEnglish
          82·
          1 year ago

          There could be meteors made of lead or mercury, natural doesn’t mean non-toxic.

          • Tak@lemmy.ml
            8·
            1 year ago

            Meteors don’t adhere to a society where maybe we don’t do shit that will hurt the group; however, people do adhere to a society. It’s a tragedy if people starve because rain washes away the crops but it’s a crime if I lock someone in my basement to starve.

        • xkforce@lemmy.world
          74·
          1 year ago

          If you think space junk is a major contributor to that instead of every landfill on the planet I have some water front property in the desert to sell you.

          • Peppycito@sh.itjust.works
            21·
            1 year ago

            If we think of the 8000 tons on orbit, how much fuel did it take to get that there? How many rockets did it take? How many rockets just got dumped in the ocean? How much hydrazine did those contain? How much support equipment is involved in producing those rockets? How much raw materials? What happens when exhaust gets injected into the upper atmosphere? Is it the same as car exhaust on the surface? What happens when you burn epoxy and carbon fiber up there? What happens in a RUD and thousands of pounds of rocket fuel gets released?

            If you think the space industry improves our environment, I wonder if you could spare some room up your ass for my head too. It’s easier living in the dark, I’d like to give it a shot.

  • einfach_orangensaft@feddit.de
    112·
    1 year ago

    i think there are about 8.000t of man made orbital objects up there right now.

    The earth has 510.100.000 square km of surface.

    That boils down to 15g of material per square km.

    Now be assured…if u life in a city, or even near a street with car traffic you are allready living with way way higher levels of polution than orbital objects could cause…unless a Rorsat with a nuklear reactor decides to crash in your backyard.

    Orbital littering is a real problem, but its dwarfed by the gigantic amount of trash and polution we allready have on earth…even if all the orbital objects would come down tomorrow…u would not notice the increase of polution.

    • chaogomu@kbin.social
      81·
      1 year ago

      15,000 Tons of material rains down on Earth from space each year. Only 5,200 Tons of it makes it down to the ground. The rest burns up.

      So, 9,800 of stuff already burning up each year. Now, most of that is silica or carbon, but there are certainly also metals. Now, more metals from man made shit is a concern, but not maybe the most pressing things…

      Then again, metal particles in the air are never good. And not something that you see in the atmosphere anywhere but metal foundries. It’s actually quite the issue.

      Overall, I’d say increasing the atmospheric metal content is a bad thing, but still less of an issue than some of the other things

  • Restaldt@lemm.ee
    4·
    1 year ago

    Don’t worry bro itll all burn up on reentry

    As if people forgot the law of conservation of mass