More dangerous than the outright, blatantly obvious damages that modern-day humans inflict upon our planet’s fragile ecosystem are the injuries we inflict that are more deleterious than anything; that is to say, those injuries which we don’t realize as having a negative impact upon our environment until it is too late. While there is a matter of debate among scientists as to whether the space just beyond Earth’s atmosphere can be described as part of this planet’s ecosystem, one certainly cannot deny that this planet’s upper atmosphere is part of the environment in which we live.

With the advent of space flight, governments and private entities (both wealthy individuals and private corporations) have been blasting off rockets into space, or at least into the border area where the Earth’s atmosphere generally ends and outer space begins (scientists are a bit fuzzy regarding this point, too). While certainly well within their rights to do so, humanity’s early forays into space have been slowly contributing to a problem that, while carefully monitored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), we as humans are currently powerless to remedy and, worse still, not only threatens the inherent natural and political rights of all humans but also endangers Homo sapiens as a species.

This problem, not widely recognized now but sure to be a well-known phrase in the coming decades, is known as the Kessler Syndrome. Explicitly defined, the Kessler Syndrome is the idea that space debris collisions can occur at an ever-increasing rate to the point that a self-sustaining system is created in the form of a positive feedback loop. While this definition may be abstruse, the Kessler Syndrome itself is easy to illustrate. Basically explained, the scenario calls for any number satellites (satellite being defined as any object in orbit above a planetary body) in space around Earth, each traveling at varying velocities and in different directions, to crash into each other. The analogy of a car accident is appropriate. While certain minor car accidents, such as fender-benders, result in little to no damage to one or both automobiles involved, a major accident, such as one that results in the “totaling” of at least one car (totaling being defined as destroying the automobile to the point that repair costs would be greater than the cost of buying a new vehicle), often produces debris. Pieces of one or more of the automobiles often break off and become scattered around the scene of the original collision. This is where the automobile accidents and real-life satellite collisions start to differ. When automobiles collide violently, debris disperses around the immediate area. When satellites collide, something entirely different occurs. Due to the greatly lessened affect of Earth’s gravity upon the satellites, collisions in space are far more dangerous. When two satellites violently collide, pieces of both satellites do not stay in the immediately vicinity. Instead, they shoot off at different vectors, often traveling at thousands of miles per hour. Within a matter of moments, two large satellites can break up into hundreds of smaller pieces, all flying and falling in different directions. Each of the smaller pieces is now a projectile that could possibly crash into other satellites. For every impact that produces debris, more small satellites are created, meaning the Kessler syndrome is a positive feedback loop (it feeds on itself). While much space debris would eventually fall to Earth within a few years due to gravity, the debris that becomes trapped in a higher orbit can linger for as much as a thousand years, destroying the possibility of a safe exit from Earth’s atmosphere.

Should there ever be a case where the Kessler Syndrome would prevent humans from launching space-faring vessels and exploring beyond this planet’s bounds, the societal ramifications would be incredibly far reaching.

In the modern era we live in, man has spread to every corner of the globe where life can be sustained, and some places where it cannot (Antarctica, for example). Due to the wave of democratic revolutions that took place during the 20^th Century, the world went from a continuous period of autocratic-dominated rule to an era in which democratic countries with representative governments now vastly outnumber countries that maintain monarchies and autocracies. This is remarkable considering how all of written human history up until the 20^th Century provides us with a record that currently confirms the fact that governments of the people are a relatively new phenomenon.

Representative governments, generally being very liberal regarding the rights of citizens, tend to enact few systematic barriers regarding travel. This usually holds true for both travel within a country’s bounds and travel that has individuals leaving a specified country. While this is certainly an ability that many people, even prolific travelers, take for granted, one must remember that many countries throughout history had governments that prevented their people from leaving, or at least had institutionalized roadblocks that made travel all but impossible. Severe travel restrictions visited many countries, including the United States, during both World Wars. It is easy to forget that the Soviet Union, a country that greatly restricted both in-country and out-of-country travel before its collapse in 1991, was the world’s largest country in terms of land area and among its most populous. To think that the almost three-hundred million people of the Soviet Union were trapped within their country less than twenty years ago is mind-boggling.

If the Kessler Syndrome were to result in a situation where space flight from planet Earth were not practically feasible due to the danger of collision with orbiting debris, humanity, both as a collective and as individual members, would be trapped on this planet. While this explanation seems plain enough, it would most assuredly have almost immediate drastic consequences.

Given that the vast majority of governments throughout human history have been autocratic in nature, it is not unreasonable to assume that sometime in the future at least one sizeable autocratic government will be established. Depending on the reactions of both world leaders and common citizens, this theoretical autocratic regime will either be shunned and will eventually fall by the weight of its own people or, worse, will inspire a world-wide power grab as the leaders of nations either centralize power or new political factions arise, these factions then implementing for stronger centralized states. At this point in time, history shows just how real both scenarios could become. For an example of the former, see Josefa Iloilo, the current president and now-dictator of Fiji (he recently dissolved the country’s highest court and suspended the country’s constitution), rose to power simply out of his own might but is destined to fall, both due to the fact that there is institutionalized popular sovereignty in Fiji based on the country’s constitution but also because, at age eighty-eight, many Fijians wishing for a new leader are just waiting for him to die rather than start a revolution. For examples of the latter, one needs only to turn to Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler, men who both rose due to popular sovereignty, or at least, were confirmed as leaders due to the support of their respective country’s citizens.

But how exactly does the Kessler syndrome figure into these postulations? Time and time again, history has shown that autocratic governments almost always trample on the rights of individual citizens in order to carry out government goals. It should be noted that these aims could just as easily be due to the desires of an elite oligarchy as they could be due to calls for action by an enraged, blood-thirty general populace. During these times of social unrest and/or governmental oppression, the primary danger of the Kessler syndrome is revealed: the destruction of the ability to have vessels leave this planet effectively prevents escape from planet Earth. While this may seem like a particularly bold claim, the interconnectivity of our world today due to both advanced telecommunications emplacements and speedy travel possibilities has effectively shrunken the world; what two-hundred years ago would have been a several-months journey by horse-and-buggy or by foot became a few-days journey with the invention of the coal-powered locomotive and the establishment of train systems. From 1803 to 1806, explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark traveled from the western boundaries of the small American republic (pre-Louisiana Purchase) to the Pacific Ocean. With the completion of the United States Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, an individual could travel from New York to San Francisco, an even greater distance, in just under a week. With the advent of cheap air travel during the 20^th Century, any individual could pay a modest sum of money to travel the same distance in about six hours. With the shrinking of our world, any motivated and well-resourced government could easily hunt down individuals. Totalitarian governments in particular have shown to have complete disregard for the sovereignty of other countries by illegally pursing individuals who have fled to escape political oppression. Examples are numerous, including famous Marxist theorist Leon Trotsky, who was assassinated in his home in Mexico by a Soviet agent; Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian who fled to the United Kingdom but was later famously murdered in London by a KGB agent who used a specially-designed umbrella gun; Karim Mohammedzadeh, an Iranian who fled to Sweden and was later killed in his Stockholm-suburb apartment; and recently Alexander Litvinenko, an ex-KGB who in 2006 was poisoned in Britain with radioactive element polonium-210 by a suspected Russian national acting on government orders. With our world becoming ever more interconnected, escape from active, murderous governments has become almost impossible. A runaway Kessler syndrome scenario would close our final frontier and our only real escape: outer space.

When noting how the Kessler syndrome prevents escape from this planet, we must not focus on just individuals or even sizeable groups of individuals who wish for a change of scenery. Humanity itself is threatened by being forced to stay within this planet’s bounds. Each year, millions of objects stray into the path of Earth as our planet passes around the sun. These objects are known as meteoroids. When they come into contact with Earth’s atmosphere, they usually burn up and can be seen in the night sky as shooting stars. However, an incredibly small fraction of meteoroids fail to burn up in the atmosphere, coming all the way down to the ground. These objects are meteorites and the greatly threaten the survival of our species. The most famous historical example, one that very clearly illustrates just how deadly meteorites actually are, is the case of the rock that crashed into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula over sixty-five million years ago. This giant meteorite had such a massive impact on Earth’s surface that geologists believe that it carved out much of what is now the Gulf of Mexico. Paleontologists usually attribute this meteorite for causing the global destruction that lead to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Astronomers predict that the Earth is long overdue for another object to stray into this planet’s path and become a meteorite, reigning destruction down upon the fragile ecosystem we have here. That a runaway-case of Kessler syndrome could effectively prevent both planetary countermeasures as well as a last-ditch escape could mean that we would be trapped on Earth, facing our own demise as a species with almost no chance of survival.

The Kessler syndrome will certainly be a hot topic on the lips of many, astrophysicist, politician, and layman, in the coming decades. Preempting the angry rhetoric sure to be found in the speeches of future firebrands and aspiring office-holders, NASA has already established a network which tracks objects larger than five centimeters in size. For larger pieces that may endanger flying aircraft and ground populations, the United States Strategic Command, a section of the United States Department of Defense, tracks pieces and advises pilots and local law enforcement officials accordingly. Our knowledge today of how dangerous Kessler really is certainly our strongest weapon in the arsenal to battle this developing problem, with scientists and researchers worldwide working day and night to create technologies that will combat this future danger. Because of what we know now, we can only hope that our future is one where our skies aren’t plagued with debris so that we may freely leave Earth for beyond as we do please.

Copyright Dan Downs 2009

The world of print journalism will never be the same again. After 150 years of service to the Denver community, the Rocky Mountain News announced Thursday that their final issue would be Friday (February 27, 2009). Owned by the E. W. Scripps Company, the newspaper had been in financial trouble for months due to an industry-wide decline in newspaper revenues and the current financial turmoil that has shaken global markets.

The Rocky Mountain News had a storied history. Its first printing was in April of 1859, when William N. Byers, an Ohioan by birth, moved to Denver in order to sell newspapers to citizens of a booming gold-rush city. Since then, the paper has been through countless adventures. Evidence of the paper?s rich history can be found in author Robert L. Perkins? The First Hundred Years-an Informal History of Denver and the Rocky Mountain News, a book that chronicles the adventures of the Denver news giant from its birth in 1859 to its one-hundred year anniversary in 1959.

It is fitting to note that, while the closing of this institution is indeed a great tragedy, both for the industry and for the loyal readers of the paper, the Rocky Mountain News has left the stage in peak condition. The tenure of the paper?s last editor, John Temple, has seen the tabloid finally solidifying its position as a no-nonsense, high-quality news source that shatters the traditional stereotype that many Americans have come to associate with tabloid newspapers. Since 2000, the Rocky Mountain News has won four Pulitzer Prizes. Three were for excellence in photography while the last one was for reporter Jim Sheeler?s ?Final Salute? article, a piece about Casualty Assistance Calls Officers in the United States Marine Corps that was recognized as an outstanding achievement of journalistic prose, form, and content. While the death of this paper is a tragic one, Rocky employees can rest assured that the content produced by the paper was not at fault for the collapse of their beloved institution. Rather, revenues from Classified ads all but disappeared with the advent of Internet posting of services and sales, especially from sites like Craigslist.

This bottoming-out of revenue streams provided by newspaper ads has had detrimental affects throughout the American newspaper industry. This past Wednesday (February 25^th, 2009) saw the announcement from the San Francisco Chronicle that the newspaper was in experiencing incredible financial hardships, with the paper losing thousands of dollars each week. Hearst Corporation, owner of the Chronicle, knows that it cannot accept these losses forever. Currently, the paper looks to be listed for sale or closing within the coming months. The Journal Register Company, a multi-state corporation that owns over three-hundred local newspapers, recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection due to the almost complete destruction of revenues.

Some newspapers seem to be surviving, if not thriving, in this world of lessened newspaper revenues nationwide. The Wall Street Journal, for example, seems to be weathering the hard times nicely to due to highly successful web-based subscription service has resulted in many people paying substantial annual fees in order to read the Journal online each day.

The Rocky Mountain Press may be the first newspaper to go this year but it will certainly not be the last. With the passing of this once-formidable institution, an industry stands on the brink and waits to see if any more papers will share the same fate as the Rocky. For the job-seeking, ex-employees of what was Denver?s top tabloid and for the dedicated readers who enjoyed their paper?s daily serving of news, the market shift that has gutted the profit-making organs of newspapers across the nation has already taken its toll and robbed the world of quality writing and photography that Denver knew and loved. This new paradigm shift, while justified according of the market?s natural tendencies, has left a world where everyone already misses their Rocky.

Copyright Daniel Downs 2009