Death By Space Junk? It’ll Soon Be More Common Than You Might Think

At the moment, your statistical chances of being injured or killed by a bolt of lightning are greater than the likelihood of getting maimed or dying by a piece of falling space junk...but experts say that's about to change.

A new report released by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) says by 2035, it's expected that at least one fatality will be caused every 24 months by falling debris from space.

And of course we're not talking about meteorite fragments or wayward chunks of Moscovium that have broken off from alien spacecraft which might hit you hard and square enough to cause an untimely demise, instead it's all the junk which humans have been littering the exosphere with over the past 70 years that's the real concern.

With nearly 10,000 functioning satellites currently orbiting the Earth and countless others which have become disabled now adrift 6,000 miles overhead, the rate at which the loosened nuts and bolts of these Flux Capacitors are raining down on the planet has been on the rise for years. But it's the increase in the frequency of private space missions that really has scientists worried.

Now that the billionaire plutocrats of the world like Elon Musk and Richard Branson are able to pin a Star Trek badge on the lapels of their factory-distressed Ferragamo t-shirts and offer the affluent-enough public a ride into space like it's a day at Magic Mountain, the amount of intragalactic flotsam and jetsam that's being produced is literally skyrocketing.

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Both the FAA and NASA say there are billions, or even trillions of untracked manmade objects that are now in peripatetic unrest around the planet we call home, and any one of these could serve as the instrument of expiration for those among its 8 billion residents. But within the next ten years, the dreck from that empyrean Sanford and Son equation is expected to swell exponentially. Which means your personal epitaph might one day have a fairer chance than not of including a passage about being impaled by one of the antennas from Sputnik than you might have ever thought was possible.

In all honesty, I've always thought it would be kinda cool to go out in a way that would be considered entirely unorthodox. I mean, we all have to kick the bucket sometime, so why not get your head shaved clean off by said bucket as it streaks to Earth at a speed greater than terminal velocity?

In the end, I guess getting bumped off by a jettisoned ashtray from the 5:15 SpaceX will just serve as one more thing for chronic worriers and agoraphobics to ruminate about, and yet another reason for the world's insurance companies to deny a death benefit. But I can't help but wonder about what might happen in a distant-enough future when we start putting things that are much larger into low orbit.

Remember, even though the Chicxulub asteroid that's thought to have wiped out all of the old Phillips 66 logos 66 million years ago was over six miles in diameter, astronomers say it would only take one measuring about eight city blocks in width to potentially destroy all life on Earth.

That means whenever Hollywood and Mattel decide to team up and place a floating Aspen Barbie Dream Town theme park in space for sheepish Karens to visit with their petulant daughters (and that absolutely is coming btw), the end of the world as we know it could be triggered simply by this pink nightmare encountering some sort of malfunction and crashing down to the planet's surface.

Now, I don't know about you, but that's a tellurian termination event that makes global thermonuclear war or a Biblically-ushered Satanic takeover look like a trip to Baskin-Robbins for a private ice cream sex party if you ask me.

In closing, I really do think it's time that we all sincerely take a moment to pause and ask ourselves just how poorly the notion of killer space junk reflects on the already-sad plight of our species and the only planet we've ever called home.

Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, which is a virtual grain of sand on a million beaches in terms of Earth's history, we've managed to pollute absolutely everything which is precious to our survival. The air is profuse with a bounty of deadly toxins; the water is contaminated with microplastics and radioactive waste; and the land is literally filled with trash as an everyday measure of sweeping the unwanted amusements of our artificially-enhanced world under Mother Nature's rug so we might live another day of dutiful denial to our distracted way of life.

And so I ask you, do we really want to launch our trashy ways into space?

Well, I guess it's already too late, isn't it? Sounds like one small step for man has become one giant leap to the same old thing for mankind.