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POLLUTION OF SPACE In my article titled “Village versus City’, I have tried to highlight the efforts by a few determined villagers to defy the attempts by the city folks to pollute their village by dumping the waste produced at the city. Here I would like to highlight one other area being heavily polluted by the human race – the Space. According to a study by US Space Agency NASA, more than five lakh pieces of debris, such as spent rocket stages, broken satellites etc, are there above us orbiting the earth in their dead tracks. The mankind has already done whatever they could ‘do’ to make this beautiful planet a place unworthy for living for their future generations by polluting it by mindless and unscientific advancement in the filed of ‘science and technology’. Each day of this ‘advancement’, as they call it, in the field of science and technology would only bring this planet very closer to its ‘untimely’ destruction. The scientific and technological advancements of the present age have already lost its original aim - the aim to help humanity to inhabit this planet more comfortably. The original aim being lost, the aim of these once sacred fields has now been replaced, as it now appears, to making this planet totally uninhabitable for the mankind at the earliest possible time. Alas, nothing, it seems, can be done even to pacify, leave alone preventing, its maddening rush to reach its new found goal, since it is done in the name of ‘scientific and technological advancement’! There are still a handful of ‘human beings’ across the world with guts and gusto in expressing their heartfelt anguish over this maddening rush. But there voices are neither not taken with the required level of seriousness it is worth, or disregarded as ‘musings of persons with a motive to prevent scientific and technological advancement’. And in certain cases these concerned voices are stifled by using strong arm tactics by the powers that be. Now the so called scientific and technological advancements have started leaving its ‘identity’ even in the space! It is polluting the space above our planet in the name of ‘space exploration’. The fight for supremacy in the space by the two super powers USA and USSR (now Russia) propelled the pollution of the space and the advent of the IT era made things more worse. Since 1957, numerous explorations of the satellites of the earth and sun have left the space a graveyard of spent rocket stages, broken man made satellites etc. By now a few more numbers of them must have been added to the estimation of NASA of the number of debris presently on the orbit i.e. nearly five lakhs – and more numbers are going to be added in the days to come! The situation is alarming, but nobody really cares. May be it is because of the fact that the ill effects of the space pollution have not yet become apparent. Or may be we donot have enough time to tackle this danger looming on our heads since we have a plethora of such issues to deal with on the ground level!