This TED Talk features space environmentalist Morabha, recorded live at TED 2019.

I am an astrodynamicist. You know, like that guy, Rich Pernell in the movie The Martian.

And it's my job to study and predict motion of objects in space.

Currently, we track about 1% of hazardous objects on orbit,

hazardous to services like location, agriculture, banking, television and communications, and soon, very soon, even the Internet itself.

Now, these services are not protected from roughly half a million objects, the size of a speck of paint,

all the way to a school bus in size. A speck of paint. Traveling at the right speed,

impacting one of these objects could render it absolutely useless. But we can't track things as

small as a speck of paint. We can only track things as small as, say, a smartphone.

So of this half million objects that we should be concerned about,

we can only track about 26,000 of these objects,

and of these 26,000, only 2,000 actually work.

Everything else is garbage.

That's a lot of garbage.

To make things a little bit worse,

most of what we launch into orbit never comes back.

We send the satellite in orbit.

It stops working, it runs out of fuel,

and we send something else up.

And then we send up something else.

And then something else.

And every once in a while, two of these things will collide with each other,

...