There is a nice little human interest story on Huffpo about a father and son who sent up a weather balloon into space (well, upper atmosphere -about 30,000 meters – high enough that the sky is black, high enough to see the curvature of the earth) and along with it an i-phone in a styrofoam box. When the balloon burst, as they knew it eventually would, the phone parachuted back to earth, filming the descent almost all the way down.
Amid all of the comments saying “Wow! Cool!” which were starting to irritate me with their triteness even though that was precisely the
Some day, this will be as common as scuba diving
depth of my own reaction, there was one commenter who raised the specter of space garbage.
I decided to vent here, rather than confront him (or her) there. Probably a well intentioned sort, just not really a space person.
1st, space goes on for gazillions of miles in all directions, and beyond that is more space, and 99% of it is emptier than a church. You can’t really damage the ecology, because it doesn’t have one. As far as places to dump garbage go, it’s probably the best one there is. In the future, once the space elevator has been built, we will use the moon as one huge garbage dump, leaving the earth absolutely pristine. One other advantage of this program is it will allow life to evolve on the moon because, atmosphere or no atmosphere, you know those fucking little cockroaches are going to find a way to survive.
2nd, this particular mission was pretty much devoid of garbage, so it’s a non-argument. 3rd, O.K., I’ll concede there is a problem of space debris in earth orbit, what with all the forgotten satellites and whatnot but, see point 2.
4th I’m guessing that whoever wrote that comment is also the same kind of person who would say “I don’t think we should be spending money on space when we have problems to solve here on earth.” That argument is so oversimplistic, so unimaginative, so ignorant of modern science and so completely against the grain of human nature, our natural curiosity and our irrepressible urge to explore that it really just plain pisses me off.
No, the proper response on reading this article should be “Wow. Two average individuals, one of whom was a child, without spending huge amounts of money, carried out an experiment that was, in some ways, more advanced than what NASA was doing in the late 1950s. Space is within reach for everybody.” These are exciting times we live in, people.
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