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CAN THIS HEROIC GUARDIAN SAVE THE GALAXY FROM THE EXISTENTIAL THREAT OF DARK MATTER DUST BUNNIES THAT DWARF THE PACIFIC PLASTIC PATCH. |
"In a new paper I show that the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope might discover interstellar trash... there is no legal authority that forbids throwing trash out of an inhabited planetary system into interstellar space… careless civilizations might dispose plastic bags while orbiting with their star around the Galactic center at 250 kilometers per second, with the hope that the films will be carried away by starlight into the Galactic halo by the time they return to the same location over a Galactic rotation period of hundreds of millions of years.
If that is common practice, the Galactic halo could have become the waste repository of Milky-Way civilizations. In that case, the halo hosts trash made of ordinary matter in the gravitational wastebasket of the dark matter. If LSST will identify trash in the Solar system, our cosmic responsibility for a cleaner environment would suggest that we venture into space with a broom."
--Professor Avi Loeb
Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
MEDIUM May 21...
