La traîne de l’anthropocène

Abstract

Discards and remainders of human forays into extraterrestrial space have been accumulating for almost 60 years in orbit around the Earth, on the surfaces of the Moon and other celestial bodies in the Solar System. What is it to be a member of a species for whom the discards and remainders of their technological capacities are not only populating territory beyond the planet that species inhabits but doing so to such an extent that they are accidentally colliding into one another? State organizations such as the European Space Agency (ESA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) construe orbital debris as hazards to be tracked, managed, and mitigated. But what else are, or might, these remains be and for whom, where, and under what conditions? Tentatively, I interpret offworld rubbish as a wake of the Anthropocene. I claim that visual inventories of offworld rubbish are one useful instrument for becoming more sensitive to the narrow envelopes of patchy, distributed, and noncoherent spaces common to shared existence at the Anthropocene.