The Earth is a medium-sized rock with some water on top, covered with gases that keep everything that lives here alive. At the very edge of that envelope begins a thin but dense layer of man-made, high-tech stuff.
People started preparing there in 1957, and now it has become a real habit. Telescopes look up and out into the wild universe. Humans live in a rotating metal bubble. Over the past five years, the number of active satellites in space has increased from barely 3,000 to nearly 14,000 and climbing. The biggest use case: “megaconstellations,” like Elon Musk’s Starlink internet service, which has about 10,000 satellites in orbit.
And then there’s the trash: 50,000 pieces of debris larger than a baseball are now orbiting Earth, along with more than a million objects larger than a coin. If you enjoy things like weather forecasting and digital communications, hopefully they don’t start to conflict with each other. Here’s a closer look at Earth’s ever-thickening blanket of man-made matter—the anthroposphere.
