Fifty-five years ago, Yuri Gagarin rocketed into orbit and began to break our bonds to our planet. To mark the occasion, the nonprofit Breakthrough Institute just announced plans to free us from an even more formidable set of bonds and send a fleet of small spacecraft beyond our solar system, off to the stars. News of the ‘Breakthrough Starshot’ plan was met with great enthusiasm, but also with more than a little skepticism. The distance between stars is vast. Our closest neighbour, the Alpha Centauri system, is 4.4 light years away – roughly 25 trillion miles. The Voyager 1 spacecraft, the fastest object ever created by humans, would take 70,000 years to travel that far. Many reporters greeted the Breakthrough Starshot as an idea grounded more in fantasy than in reality.

In 1908, a flaming meteor fell through the Earth’s atmosphere and exploded above the Stony Tunguska river in the Siberian forest. The result was shocking: 80 million trees over 820 square miles were blown over like toothpicks and mankind began to fear destruction from outer space. A century later, it seems this fear should be focused not on natural objects from the heavens. Rather, a greater danger to man is the man-made debris orbiting the earth. This “space junk” threatens the Earth’s environment in several ways.