Atlantis Dispatch 005:
in which ATLANTIS contemplates space junk
Map of crewed moon mission landing sites, where bags of human excrement can be found. Courtesy NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
May 14th, 2021
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Well, world, Ingenuity continues to be a resounding success! Since its glorious inaugural flight, on April 19th, it has gone aerial several more times, and has flown so well that NASA has given it a new mission. Now, Ingenuity will level up on the kinds of terrain it will maneuver and will help prepare future choppers who will join in the hunt for past life.
So while Ingenuity was charging its solar panels, we took a step back from all of that glowing achievement and began to contemplate the dark little question that we planted in our last dispatch: what will become of all the scraps and story seeds that have been planted in Ingenuity’s wake?
The question, like the universe, began expanding. No longer were we just thinking about Ingenuity’s Wright Flyer swatch, or the Octavia E. Butler Landing. We started reflecting on the other fragments, the ones that float to the surface whenever we go to space. Reader, in our leisure, a patchy genealogy of space artifacts began to emerge.
We reflected on the Polaroid of Charles Duke’s family that the Apollo astronaut left on the Moon in 1972, and on Voyager’s famous golden record, launched into space in 1977, poised to play Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” for any alien who can figure out how to work the record player (most extant humans sure can’t). Then, we flashed forward to 2018, looking out to Elon’s Tesla Roadster, which orbits the Earth and which contains, in its glove compartment, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, compressed, and etched, in all of its glory, onto a quartz storage device.
We even took for an imaginative spin the infamous lunar library, which flew and crashed into to the Moon on the Beresheet lunar lander. This library (Borges much?) is a nickel storage block that contains millions of pages of language primers, books, and DNA sequences. Between its alloyed sheets, stuck down in the synthetic resin layers, lie the remains of some stowaway tardigrades.
In our reverie, we started wondering, what are these shards of meaning we float across the universe and deposit on other planets? And what are they doing? Are they the code of our future stories? Will they (or those dehydrated tardigrades!) take on a cultural life of their own?
Or are they bits of sentimental space litter that demonstrate how far we are from grasping our insignificance in the grand scheme of things? The distance between plastic wrapped Polaroids and Venusian cloud-capped towers is pretty great.
We were about to delve further into this thicket of cultural meaning, when suddenly (like Prospero remembering his drunken would-be assassins in Shakespeare’s otherworldly Tempest), we recalled the blazing hot mess, the one that appeared in late March, way up in the sky above Seattle. What in the universe was it? A fleet of fiery extraterrestrial observers on a high-speed drive by?
Internet sleuths got to work. It turned out that it was SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket burning up after it had dropped off sixty of the company’s Starlink satellites. The Falcon 9 didn’t quite make its deorbit burn, which it does by firing up its engines, descending into Earth’s outer atmosphere, and annihilating itself—you know, so it doesn’t add to the pile of space junk already out there. Instead, at least parts of it will join the ranks of satellite fragments, paint chips, rocket parts, and metallic crumples in LEO, the low Earth orbit: that band of junk that makes Earth look, from a distance, like it has a bad case of headlice.
Must we generate such refuse? Can we devise new ways to probe the universe without, umm, scattering probes all over it? We’ve found ourselves wondering about this phenomenon, especially, since, at least for some starry-eyed rocketeers, a central purpose of space exploration is to escape the junkyard that we’re creating on our own planet. (The lunar library, for one, was conceived as a back-up drive for planet Earth.) So, we asked, can we change our ways before we replicate the whole system? The question turned out to be a deep one for old Atlantis, one that sticks right in the craw of life.
If we take, say, a thermodynamic view of life (like the one originally advanced by Erwin Schrödinger), then as life self-organizes and becomes more complex, entropy increases in proportion to the work life does to maintain its organization. Life in, junk out. So, on Earth we get landfills filled with silicon-lithium batteries. In LEO, so far, just scrap metal. (Note, Bowie’s tin can never was recycled.) Inevitably, it seems, there will be more.
But does it have to be this way? Hmm, we can’t break the arrow of time, the second law of thermodynamics: things fall apart. Entropy shows up whenever things get organized—it’s the disordered energy that is unable to do work. So, can we circle back from the detritus of our grand projects? Create a new biosphere that repurposes the entropic byproducts of our schemes?
Well, some kind of reorganization might be on the horizon. It turns out that there are ecological perspectives from which our interplanetary life systems take a on an illuminatingly different shape.
This week, Atlantis spoke with SFI Omidyar fellow Mingzhen Lu. Lu is currently leading a fascinating research program that investigates the ways that, at certain threshold moments, complex adaptive systems (for example, forests and cities) tend to gather and reconstitute their trash.
As a doctoral researcher in biogeochemistry, Lu became captivated by the ways that ecological systems evolve to become more and more efficient at repurposing waste products. In the evolution of life, for example, some organisms evolved to metabolize oxygen, which was, for a time, a form of waste toxic to life. When we take an evolutionary viewpoint, Lu explained, the things we often think of as waste can become a useful resources
Lu explores the phenomenon in organic, inorganic, and informational systems. Coal, he pointed out, is the product of dead organic matter, and humans repurpose it for energy. In the realm of digital information, Lu noted, navy officers repurposed a century of ocean logs that had piled up in library archives, which, until recently, seemed useless.
So how do we know when a system is ready to convert its trash into new biotic or informational energy? Lu described the foundational observations driving his research: there seem to be two significant stages of an ecosystem’s lifecycle when trash takes on a new role.
On the one hand, when trash accumulates to a point where it can be useful, individuals within a system start to put it to use as energy. So, cow manure, after a time, becomes the fertilizer for new crops, and methane eventually gets siphoned from Los Angeles landfills for power. (Atlantis suspects, by contrast, that the bags of human feces on the Moon, left behind by the Apollo astronauts, have not reached a useful capacity just yet!) On the other hand, if trash accumulates to a point of being harmful—as the massive quantities of microplastics in the ocean have become, for example—individuals will mobilize to gather and, potentially, repurpose it.
So, what about all of that space junk? Well, it’s definitely accumulating. It’s both an increasingly valuable pile of technological debris, and a bunch of stuff that threatens space missions (and blocks the views of telescopes). To Atlantis, it looks like Lu’s ecological work might just afford us a view into the future. As he points out, there’s a cool new mission called ClearSpace-1 already at work on the problem of gathering up old satellites…
Atlantis can’t wait to know how the battle between time and ClearSpace-1, or any other ambitious junk-collecting organization, will turn out. Will it clear the Earth of its strange growing, glowing halo? And then what? Leave it pristine? Well, obviously, not. We’ll probably fill that squeaky-clean orbit with a grand floating resort made of repurposed oceanic microplastic.
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Tune in next time, when Atlantis contemplates A wild week in space news