The Elusive Peril of Space Junk

Makes me wonder if sane interstellar travel requires a warp drive in order to bend debris around the vehicle. See the speculated UFO propulsion observed in the USS Nimitz incident.

While "sandblasted" might be hyperbolic, micrometeoroid and orbital debris (MMOD) is a known risk to the ISS and they have a variety of shields to try on protect it.[1]

[1]https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/E_Christianse...

In the USA we had herds of bison that took days to pass by, clouds of birds that blocked out the sun, rivers so thick with fish you could walk across them, trees so huge they break the mind, and all of it was destroyed with hardly a thought. We took the Great Plains and made the Dust Bowl.

Today our industrial agriculture creates dead zones in the oceans, our energy system is toxic, oil spills regularly destroy life over vast areas, we are fishing the oceans to death, and about to start mining the sea floors, our topsoil is blowing and washing away, I could go on and on.

I think it's fundamentally an entropic phenomenon. You mine rocks (easy rel.), then you refine them into minerals (less easy) and materials, then you arrange those into complex objects with perhaps thousands of materials (difficult).

Obs: difficulties vary with material, product, etc.

Finally, reverting this complex arrangement back into materials (very difficult) generally has at least as much energy cost as manufacturing did. If you were religious about it, it would probably take orders of magnitude more energy (trace materials add the difficulty); the cost would probably scale as a function of purity (99% purity easy, 99.999% purity hard), diverging to infinity as you approach 100% purity.

We have a discount because the purity of rocks we can easily find is generally greater than the purity left by our complex products. So we can just discard everything. Eventually, this will catch up to us. Eventually productive mineral deposits (for some select elements first) will get increasingly hard to access, and we'll be forced into processing our own waste to obtain it. It seems our energy costs will grow and grow.

What is truly incredible is that organic life has managed to largely enter a steady state into this process. Every substance used by life has a cycle (usually some lifeform plays a role in that cycle), from water to carbon, to sulfur, nitrogen, and so on. Organic life has entered a steady state of recycling its own waste, assembling itself from ashes of its ancestors. Life tolerates impurity very well. This is all driven by sunlight.

Maybe technological civilization can approach it as well. In time, we'll certainly have to (or face perish).

Here are a few things we’ve done really well on IMO that don’t fit with the narrative:

All the nations got together and fixed the ozone layer.

We created the national park system and NWR’s with surprisingly large tracts of land.

Whaling is banned in the USA and many other countries AFAIK.

No more orca shows at sea world after black fish and it seems like we’re moving in the right direction with captive whales and dolphins?

Acid rain is way better. (That was a huge deal in the 80s)

We’re getting close to completely getting off coal as a power source (in the US)

A large portion of new power capacity is renewable.

Recycling looks like it doesn’t actually work well but it’s amazing that almost every household does it in an effort to help.