Unsatisfied with catastrophically polluting planet Earth by discharging billions of tons of plastic into the oceans and, equally, billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, humankind has turned its attention to the moon where after six manned missions exploring its surface they’ve left “discarded and abandon spacecraft components, bags of human excreta, scientific equipment and other objects [such as] flags, golf balls, photographs and religious texts.”
The quote comes from a report in the journal Nature Geoscience. I almost forgot to mention human detritus in space around the Earth. This accumulation of low Earth orbit detritus made up of objects from a few millimetres to several metres in size can travel at speeds of up to 20,000 km/h and it threatens to pose a serious problem to both human and robotic space activities according to the spaceam.co.uk website.
And so, more than 50 years after Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon and left his boot mark in the dust, we now have the beginnings of a heavily polluted moon, once pristinely pure, unattached by humankind.
And it is going to get worse because humans are expected to return in 2025 as part of NASA’s Artemis programme.
A report states that the moon has entered the Anthropocene era. This describes an era in which humans dominate and leave their mark everywhere.
Human activity has overtaken nature as a driving force in changing planet Earth and in due course no doubt this will happen on the moon which lacks atmosphere. There is no wind or liquid water to change it neither is there volcanic activity to change the surface.
Within 50 years the lunar landscape will be entirely different thanks to good old humankind which likes to leave its polluting footprint everywhere it goes as a kind of disease.
Justin Holcomb of the University of Kansas said: “In the context of the new space race, the lunar landscape will be entirely different in 50 years.”
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