Aliens Might Have Filled Space With Junk Like We Fill Our Oceans and Orbit

If there are technological aliens in our galaxy, then it is possible that their space junk could be part of the Interstellar material that makes it to our solar system. How much depends upon how many technological alien civilizations there are and how much junk is made from what they are doing.

It will be decades to centuries before we can go to another solar system or even very far beyond Pluto. We are able to take improving looks at what is in our solar system and what happens to drift into our solar system for evidence of Aliens.

A Lot of Interstellar Space Junk Seems Inevitable If Aliens are Making Spaceships or Probes

Space is huge so we and aliens will probably have to move at very high speeds like 20 to 99% of the speed of light if they want travel times to be as economically short as possible.

If they are using various kinds of spaceships and probes and they are moving at high speeds then parts could break off intentionally or unintentionally. The spaceships and probes would move at high speeds between solar systems almost all the time. They would not be able to stop and gather any part that broke off. Voyager 1 will run out of power and stop working in 2025. It will then be mainly inert and will be unable to communicate with Earth. Eventually it could run into something.

If Aliens were not making round trips or were not moving between two alien habitats then probes and spaceships will eventually wear out.

All fly-by missions end up with something that all becomes space junk.

The world has about 5 to 13 million tons of plastic waste every year in our rivers, lakes and oceans. This is tens of billions of pieces of man-made junk that mixes in with plants, fish and debris from nature. Our manmade ocean junk is mainly parts of fishing nets and fishing related material. Natural stuff ranges from bits of seaweed to icebergs. If you were sitting on a small island and look at what washed up on the beach it would be a lot more natural material than man-made. However, wait around long enough and there would occasionally be man-made junk.

Earth orbit is filled with space junk from our satellites. Earth orbit was relatively free of material and then we put up satellites and rockets that collided or shed parts. There might be more man-made space junk than natural meteorites in our heavily used earth orbits.

A lot of What We Detect In Space We Do Not Really See. Assumptions, Logic and Analysis Are Mixed in With Dots

We assume natural space rocks dominate the solar system and the universe. We can only see the big ones in detail. We detect small objects that we can barely see as dots. There is a lot we cannot see at all but we logically assume is there based upon what we can see. There is what we can see as dots. There is the far larger things we can see in some detail.

In Astronomy, there is a lot of analysis of the light of dots to tease out information. What is the color of the dot? How fast is it moving? What is the light curve like? All kinds of tricks to get information from dots. Some of it is based upon assumptions. If the light gets less bright and we assume the light is a star then probably something passed in front of it. We assume that what passed in front of the star was usually a planet. Then we think about the size if it was a planet based on how much less bright the star got. However, it could also have been a far closer dust cloud.

What Size Rocks Can We See Near Jupiter?

There are 79 known moons of Jupiter. In 1610, Galileo could see four moons as light smudges with his 30X telescope. By the time that the Voyager space probes reached Jupiter, around 1979, 13 moons had been discovered. Five through 13 were about 14 to 100 kilometers in size. This did not include Themisto (4 kilometers wide) which we kind of saw in 1975 but then lost track of until 2000. Voyager found three inner moons in 1979: Metis (2 kilometers wide); Adrastea (20 kilometers wide); and Thebe (100 kilometers wide).

1999-2003, 34 tiny moons, in weird orbits and averaging 3 km (1.9 mi) in diameter were found.

2004-2017, 17 more moons found.

2018, there was confirmation that ten more moons were found.

If Jupiter moon-sized 2-kilometer objects were out at the distance Jupiter from Earth but not right beside Jupiter then we would not find them.

A new telescope with an LSST abbreviated name will really begin operating in 2022. This will let us see what we expect will be hundreds of objects in the 1-kilometer size range at Jupiter distance.

Near Earth We Can See Smaller Rocks than the moons at Jupiter

We can see smaller rocks. We can only some 1-kilometer diameter near-earth asteroids and very few 100-meter sized asteroids. LSST should let us find 50,000 near earth asteroids in the 100-meter size class in its first 60 working days in 2022. This will be on top of the 18,000 mostly larger rocks we know about now. This is out of an estimated 3 million near earth asteroids.

36 thoughts on “Aliens Might Have Filled Space With Junk Like We Fill Our Oceans and Orbit”

  1. I think the relevant question is: what about us?
    That is, right here and now, in the context of this article, we have (just, given luck and lots of warning) the ability to grab, or at least look at, some cosmic flotsam that drifts though space if it gets close enough. And we will have increasing ability to grab such stuff over the next century or so.

    During this time we would most probably be “behind” any alien race that was making enough space stuff to be responsible for the space junk.

    SO… the question is really, what would a 2020 Earth, or a 2050, 2090, etc. Earth, be able to do with a fragment of an alien thing that happened to drift by. (Because if 2020 Earth grabs it, then 2090 Earth will still have it available to study.)

    And I’m going to guess that junk, the equivalent of an old thong, would probably be easier to understand and learn from, than a chunk of their cutting edge tech.

  2. You know, we would be able to learn a lot about the “Thems” by studying even the most trivial of their cast-offs.

    But, there are constraints on who can access what junk.

    A scientist in the 1850s insn’t going to have access to a flip, or a flop; no way one could make down to the surface whole. (I, too, call them thongs upon occasion, but “flip-flops” has a more irreverent connotation).

    So, a peoples would need to meet the space-grot at least part of the way.

    From a barnacle encrusted flip, what could an alien scientist learn about Us? Would they understand that it was an object meant to be worn on our body?
    Would they understand that the barnacles were only hitchers?

    They’d get DNA from the B’s, and all the microscopic critters in and on them.

    As far as advancing their understanding of “materials” or manufacturing processes goes, it would be unlikely that they wouldn’t already “be there”.

    There is a fairly narrow (cosmic) window, I think, during which a civilization is advanced enough to reach the flotsam; being knowledgeable enough to learn from it — but not SO advanced that they’re unable to glean any new and useful basic knowledge from its study, for having already “been there – done that.”

  3. It would be easy to get into the “are there any other advanced intentional intelligent entities, and if there are, how many, and for how long have they been kickin’ it” debate.

    Instead, for the argument of my joke, I will answer these questions with “Yes”, “Butt tons” and “Since before the GEAR-WARS”.

    And so, below is how there is a universal catalogue of all existing astronomical objects, and their relationships to one another.

    “You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.”

  4. In total, about 20% of Neanderthal DNA is encoded in modern humans genomes. On average, an individual with Neanderthal DNA inherits about 1.5% of their DNA from Neanderthals.

    The further back a persons parents most common ancestor, the more likely that you will inherit a totally different chunk of the 20% from each parent.

    My parents, both European, were not at all related. As a result, I inherited almost 4% of my DNA from Neanderthals.

    In other words, don’t insult my heritage, you Homo! (sapiensapien) 🙂

    https://phys.org/news/2012-03-evidence-neanderthals-boats-modern-humans.html

    https://io9.gizmodo.com/5889484/neanderthals-were-sailing-the-mediterranean-100000-years-ago

    https://anthropology.net/2017/01/01/neanderthals-on-a-boat/

  5. We also have the possibly disrupting effect of defeating aging. If we only die from accidents or suicide, it may change the perspective some people have on long term projects. If life is too boring to wait for millennia for some answer, maybe go into hibernation and skip the waiting.

    What information will any civilization (us included) want to collect from other star systems. Detecting life or transmissions from a technological species can be done faster and cheaper by remote sensing. Why go there?

    I can imagine it will be interesting sampling life forms because that is probably impossible with telescopes. Monitoring as a security measure is probably a realistic scenario if evolving life is detected. Maybe setting up infrastructure or preparing for first contact…
    Sci-fi has a good number of doomsday scenarios also.

  6. And out of those, how many would be tested for isotope ratios? As opposed to mined for useful minerals during the bronze age.

  7. Yeah, I’m not going to claim that “civilization” is a coherent project.
    Likewise various cities, some thousands of years old, aren’t a “project” with a goal that people maintain. They are just a whole bunch of different people doing different stuff for different reasons, but all in the same place.

    However, my existing examples do point to a couple of ideas. Seriously long term projects can be done either as religious projects or as a continuous response to a continuous threat.

    Not sure which would be more concerning for those on the receiving end of said projects.

  8. Of course. 
    Apart from that what have The Romans ever done for us?
    It would be a fair-sight harder to come up with 10,000 year endeavors.
    Civilization … is the only candidate.
    But not with single intent. 

    I was thinking about millions of years being in “the interstellar civilization interest-window”. Where sending out probes that take 25,000 years at the least to get to the local group of stars, is reasonable. Where the advance of great technology is so intense that the modules sent to the stars are compact, self-repairing, endowed with superb optics, sensors, sampling devices. Where they’re going slow enough to STAY in target systems through ephemeris billiard braking, and take up residence for thousands — perhaps millions — of years. 

    Gathering metrology. 
    Making copies to return to the Civilization’s Hub star system. 
    And copies-of-copies to send in turn to forward stars. 

    With AI’s way in excess of human intelligence. 
    Curious. Shy. Keen. Secure. 

    Just saying,
    GoatGuy

  9. The typical Dyson structure around a Sun-like star is only ~1 AU from the star. Our solar system is at least 1000 AU in radius with objects like Sedna etc. Perhaps as much as 100000 AU with the Oort cloud. That’s several orders of magnitude larger.

    The amount of material may be on a more closely comparable scale, but it may still be modest compared to the whole stellar system. And then there’s still the issue of interstellar distances (and volume).

  10. “If Earth had vital resources aliens needed they would have collected it by now, “

    Who said they didn’t? Do you see any scrith deposits remaining around here?

  11. I suspect that even a flipflop (or thong as my nation calls them) would be of enormous technical interest even to an 1850s scientist. The elastomers alone would be something that they could understand, but not actually have themselves, and would probably push and encourage someone to develop a properly vulcanised rubber decades before Goodyear.

    A clever manufacturer would probably spot the signs that indicated how it was manufactured. Giving further useful hints on manufacturing tech.

    It might be argued that a thong would be more useful to people of the past than a iphone would be, because the simple product is easier to understand.

  12. “I can’t think of a 1,000 year project that Man has endeavored and was still maintaining 1,000 years past its inception. “

    Great wall of China started in either 500 BC or 200 BC depending on your definitions. It was still maintained as a defensive structure until about the 20th Century, and is still maintained today as a cultural and money making artifact.

    A number of Christian cathedrals have been steadily maintained for a thousand years or more. Not to mention the Catholic and Orthodox churches themselves.

    The main Muslim temples likewise.

  13. I tried, but I didn’t manage to get past the first few chapters of Accelerando.

    Fascinating titbit there about Samuel Seymour. Talk about nominative determinism.

  14. Goat, did you just argue that no civilization would produce that much pollution because that much pollution would be hazardous, possibly to others?
    Because if so, I have some bad news for you.

  15. Is there really a difference in scale?
    Once a civilization reaches the Dyson sphere stage, their manufactured bits have literally reached the scale of a pre-Solar cloud, and should a Dyson sphere (or swarm, I’m not racist) disintegrate (for whatever natural or artificial reason) then that’s a whole lot of stuff to go flying around.

  16. Truly, I don’t expect it to be quite that extreme, maybe the size of a few cement mixers, or something else altogether, but a I do imagine a lot of very smart people, possibly much smarter than people can be naturally, will be trying to do this before century’s end. Timeframes are slippery things. Recall that Samuel Seymour, an eye-witness to Lincoln’s assassination, once appeared on the television game show “I’ve Got a Secret . . .”

    The extreme example of a soda can sized craft was one of the devices in Accelerando, a 2005 novel by Charles Stross which told an extended tale of a “family” moving into and through technological singularities (or The Singularity, if you prefer) over the course of the 21st century. It’s quite weird but a lot of fun if you can get past the first few chapters.

    From Wikipedia: “The alien router, orbiting a 3-light-year-distant brown dwarf star named Hyundai +4904/-56, is visited by the spacecraft Field Circus, a Coke-can-sized mass of computronium propelled by a Jupiter-based laser and a lightsail. Amber and 62 others have uploaded themselves to become the virtualised crew.”

    It’s no substitute for real science and engineering, of course, but for what it is worth, Accelerando won the Locus Award in 2006, and was nominated for several other awards in 2005 and 2006, including the Hugo, John W. Campbell, Arthur C. Clarke, and British Science Fiction Association Awards.

  17. If aliens know we exist, they must be so far advanced that we come across as positively cro-magnon like. Probably big signs posted around our solar system that says “don’t bother, dump your trash and carry on”. If Earth had vital resources aliens needed they would have collected it by now, but we are basically a boring lump of iron rock populated by a bunch of insecure low-IQ humans who’s main mission seems to be to destroy the planet. So, yeah, a perfect place to dump the space trash.

  18. “Even the hairless apes on Earth have realized that throwing away space ships is not optimal.”

    True. True. And yet, there’s an estimated 2-3 million sunken vessels at the waters bottom side. And, if you include every solo or primitive craft, from 16′ aluminium fishing boats, to dug-out logs and birch bark canoes, going back at least twenty-thousand years, you’re talking about tens upon tens of millions.

    And Neanderthals were water wise, too. So, add another two hundred thousand years of their lost and rotten.

    Even with that kind of over abundance, we’ve still only found about 1% of the biggest, most recent, (past 5-6 thousand years) wrecks; virtually zero of the smalls. And every single one of those tens-of-millions lay less than 13,000 miles from wherever it is you’re sitting right now.

    And space is so much more biggerer than one worlds oceans.

  19. Mmmm… just as a Mind Exercise, how about I reveal that no fewer than 10,000 of these objects fell over the Earth’s surface over the last million years. 

    25% of those haven’t eroded away. 
    22% landed on land. 
    15% made it through the last 10 ice ages (being equatorial). Nearly
    50% are within 100 meters of the surface of the dirt they came to rest in.  

    How many does that leave?

    10,000 × 0.25 × 0.22 × 0.15 × 0.50 → 40 objects

    Now, we know those 40 are all encircling just the clement equatorial region, about 50% of the Earth’s total land area. About 100,000,000 mi². Therefore, on the average, each occupies 100,000,000 mi² ÷ 40 → 2,500,000 mi².  Those would be circles having diameters of about 1,700 miles. About 2,800 km. 

    Whats chances you’d find one, in a particular 2,800 km diameter circle?

    Mmmm… low.
    Just saying,
    GoatGuy

  20. A counter argument is that some of it would have collided with Earth by now and since isotope ratios in elemental material are believed to vary with origin then they’d have stuck out like sore thumbs.

  21. I’m hopeful that by the time we become interstellar (perhaps earlier), we’ll learn to be more mindful of our waste, more systematic and complete in our recycling, etc, so that our growth can be sustainable. I expect a similar learning curve from other civilizations.

    The “things breaking off mid-flight” is a valid concern, but I expect the build quality of advanced interstellar craft to be quite a bit higher than our low-tech, weight-limited, just-barely-strong-enough satellites and rockets. But accidents can still happen.

  22. Even though we all hope that anything of Extraterrestrial origin we find would be “Space-Shipy”, it’s far more likely it’d be the space equivalent of flip-flops.

    Every year three billion new pair of flip flops are sold. Six billion flip-flops. Over ten years, Sixty billion flip-flops. And a crap-load of them end up floating around the oceans, washing up on beaches.

    Below is a picture of a flip-flop encrusted with barnacles.

    If a space version was captured as it was floating past Earth, we’d spend a decade trying to communicate with the “Barnacles”, trying to decode and back-engineering their interstellar “Flip-Flop” spacecraft tech.

    *PHOTO WOULD BE HERE, IF POSTING PHOTOS WORKED

  23. That an advanced civilization has advanced telescopes is a line of thinking that has enough independent variables as to cause one to “think on it” for awhile. 

    ⇒ Einstein Gravity-lens assisted, or not? 

    ⇒ Sparse-filled mirror-based, or dense?
    ⇒ … Synthetic aperture “interferometer” style?

    ⇒ Gravitationally moored, or not?

    ⇒ Probes over scopes?  
    ⇒ … timelines?
    ⇒ … autonomy?
    ⇒ … complexities of self-replication?

    While gravitational lenses assist the magnification and the brightness, they definitely have limitations: pointing is mostly fixed, stellar gravitational anisotropies impact image; usefulness requires a massive primary, and a smaller but still massive secondary starshade to block the lensing star, and the parent-star of a remote stellar system.  

    Yet, thinking on this, its all related to time frame.

    Mankind’s apparent window-of-interest is largely that of human lifetime scale. I can’t think of a 1,000 year project that Man has endeavored and was still maintaining 1,000 years past its inception. Today, in the Internet Era, I don’t think we even collectively have interests that survive 100 years. Barely. 

    But with mucn MUCH longer timescales, precision remote sensing (including remote probes and their return) is possible. The timeline is just REALLY stretched out. 10,000 years is nothing at all. To galaxies, stars, planets and evolutionary processes.  

    Just saying,
    GoatGuy

  24. Even though we all hope that anything of Extraterrestrial origin we find would be “Space-Shipy”, it’s far more likely it’d be the space equivalent of flip-flops.

    Every year three billion new pair of flip flops are sold. Six billion flip-flops. Over ten years, Sixty billion flip-flops. And a crap-load of them end up floating around the oceans, washing up on beaches.

    Below is a picture of a flip-flop encrusted with barnacles.

    If a space version was captured as it was floating past Earth, we’d spend a decade trying to communicate with the “Barnacles; trying to decode and back-engineer their interstellar “Flip-Flop” spacecraft tech.

  25. An advanced alien civilization is likely to have advanced telescopes, which will have the resolution to detect clues of the Earth eco system. Life has existed here for a long time and altered the environment, atmospheric composition etc. If aliens are interested in life, our solar system would be a natural target and they would want to put permanent probes here to monitor the development. I think fly-by is not so interesting because they can gather most general information with telescopes.

    If we want to find their artifacts, we should ask ourselves what kind of information they are collecting that they can’t collect with remote sensing. That would tell us something about how far away the probes may sit. How does a small probe compare to a gravity lens telescope in sensor resolution? If they are stationary in the solar system, they will likely send information out. It may be easier to detect the transmissions than the probes.

    If the probe is even more advanced, it could be a life form of its own and it may have no need to send data out to anyone. Even so, such a thing would have to stop somewhere for maintenance and multiplying. I find it hard to imagine a use case for a can sized fly-by mission. Space junk also seems wasteful. Even the hairless apes on Earth have realized that throwing away space ships is not optimal.

  26. There’s a difference in scale between ejecta of the pre-Solar molecular cloud and the amount of technological detritus a spacefaring civilisation can manage to build, though. If something does get here, the odds are it’s been created through natural processes.

  27. REPOSTING as IKNOW. Forgot to log in.

    I’ve thought for a while that one high-on-my-list ways we’ll make first contact is when a group of inter-galactic lawyer/advocates offer to represent Earths interests in a class action suit, against Galacti-Corp, being brought on behalf of a few of the local star system life-forms.

    As a protected indigenous species, it would be a violation of our native property rights to have Galacti-corp strip miners gobbling up the tastiest bits of our Oort cloud goodies.

    Of course, it won’t be long before “counter-culture” hipster aliens start showing up, appropriating Human culture. You know, walking around on only two of their lower limbs, gluing cat hair to their top bladders… self-identifying as “Human”.

    In all honesty, it’s probably just as likely that we’ll be contacted by someone representing a larger Galactic bureaucracy, as that we’ll find the errant interstellar equivalent of Musk’s Tesla parked in an elliptical orbit around Venus.

  28. I’ve thought for a while that one high-on-my-list ways we’ll make first contact is when a group of inter-galactic lawyer/advocates offer to represent Earths interests in a class action suit, against Galacti-Corp, being brought on behalf of a few of the local star system life-forms.

    As a protected indigenous species, it would be a violation of our native property rights to have Galacti-corp strip miners gobbling up the tastiest bits of our Oort cloud goodies.

    Of course, it won’t be long before “counter-culture” hipster aliens start showing up, appropriating Human culture.

    You know, walking around on only two of their lower limbs, gluing cat hair to their top bladders… self-identifying as “Human”.

    In all honesty, it’s probably just as likely that we’ll be contacted by someone representing a larger Galactic bureaucracy, as that we’ll find the errant interstellar equivalent of Musk’s Tesla parked in an elliptical orbit around Venus.

  29. “Something not much larger than a soda can”

    Its OK if you diss me for this reply, its naívitè and last-century “Man cannot go faster than the speed of sound” 19th century silliness. I probably deserve it.

    But seriously: the problem with “can size” in the context of “interstellar distances” is that the smaller-the-can, the less power, reaction mass, ‘stuff’ and especially telemetry-related-stuff it can contain.  

    Now, I grant that a soda-can full of AI super-goodness, cheerily lobbed at a nearby star, without requiring a light speed communications channel back to Ol Urth, is a fine thing to do. In order that it might accomplish a mission goal of taking up residence in the target stellar system, deploying film-thick solar collectors, and to very, very slowly ‘jet’ around the system over thousands-to-millions of years powered nearly exclusively from the Great Fusor’s output and captured whiffs of gas is entirely realistic.  

    Just not over human-scale time frames. 
    Which is OK.
    Entirely.

    Such and entity could conceivably — slowly — visit all the system’s planets, moons, interplanetary asteroids, exo-Kuiper and exo-Oört belt objects. Building up a huge findings base of information.  

    Being a Hugely Endowed AI, it would seem within its purview to build return-rockets, to jet BACK — albeit slowly — to Urth. To return the Good News. Eventually.

    But the “can size” still matters a lot.

    Just saying,
    GoatGuy

  30. Both counts somewhat simplistic, I’m afraid.

    Doesn’t matter if you’re Jody Astrobleme, K’zif-the-Klingon, the Galactic Imperium or anyone else: if space becomes filled with a teeming minefield of macro-to-microscopic bits of civilization-junk … in addition to all the bits from the awkwardly messy stellar-planetary-formation process, the odds of going lightyears of distance (the normal unit of space) without colliding with stuff becomes quite low.

    Accidentally colliding with stuff becomes lethal at meaningfully useful interstellar speeds.

    Separately, ‘whatever is in a planet’s gravitation defined orbital well, (loosely paraphrased) does in fact still have potential for taking flight quite outside the planet’s gravitation mantle … with interaction via the so-called Three Body Dynamics physics.

    To wit, a substantial number of the Oort and Kuiper belts comets and dwarf planets are thought to be ‘ejecta’ from early Solar System planetary formation. Moreover, the same 3-body thing quite successfully threw off 3% or more of the original pre-solar molecular cloud of condensing protoplanetary mass to literally interstellar destinations.

    Just saying.
    GoatGuy

  31. “It will be decades to centuries before we can go to another solar system or even very far beyond Pluto.”

    Heh, barring some sort of dystopian collapse. I expect someone will have something on the way between stars by the end of this century, even if it is little bigger than a soda can and inhabited by machine stored personalities.

  32. The probability of a single alien piece of junk reaching the solar system is very low, but if spacefaring aliens are common enough, and you multiply by potentially billions of years of activity, the odds increase quite a bit.

    As for whatever is in their planet’s orbit, this is irrelevant, since it won’t become interstellar junk.

  33. As Douglas Adams used to say, “Space is big.” Even if aliens fill their orbits with enough junk to trigger Kessler syndrome, star systems are so far away from each other that the probability that they’ll reach here is literally astronomically low.

Comments are closed.