afteR PLASTIC SOUP IT'S TIME FOR SPACE WASTE

To be honest, I have missed the news about the ability of human kind to clean space. Not that I knew we were already at a point that this is seriously needed. If not we will be trapped on this planet forever. On the other hand and at the same time,  we are trying te deal with the effects of climate change. This is quite a mess, I would say.  Potentially destroying your own habitat and not able to escape from it all as well. Where will this lead us?  To more and faster innovation!

You might say, this will not be a problem in the short term. But when I learned that our ability to launch, operate and maintain communication satellites will be hampered, it sounded like serious business.  We have 5G coming up with exponentially growing amounts of data shared across the planet and exchanged through satellite connections.  M2M communication is in its infancy and vast amount of applications consuming data still to be created. It's clear to me this problem will not disappear by itself.

Courtesy of Willem de Kam

However, it was a young Dutch student who invented a solution to get rid of the plastic soup. Then the ideas presented in the attached movie might be just an initial step to tackle this issue and mark the beginning of more beautiful innovations that will follow.  This might lead to another field of newly invented jobs which have to do with the management of the orbital space around the planet: regulation, traffic management, maintenance and cleaning, entertainment, etc. I am therefore hopeful, that we are about to see the beginning of a new era, like we did with the invention of the steam engine and electricity. It might be a future somewhere in between Star Trek and Blade Runner, but who knows?