Imagine snail mail and landlines being primary forms of communication! Not too hard to imagine because that was soooo fifteen years ago you might think. But Space Junk 3D, a new Imax 3-D movie that debuted on January 13 elucidates that though these forms of communication might be soooooo fifteen years from now.

The movie highlights the Kessler Effect, also known as the Kessler Syndrome, which points to rogue trash as an antagonist that will prevent space travel and satellite communications. But Donald Kessler, who proposed the theory in 1978, wasn’t talking about baby diapers or hamburger wrappers. He was talking about space trash.

Trash is as ugly as it is omnipresent. Consistent with humanity’s tradition of befouling every place we go, we have been dumping detritus even in the heavens ever since we entered the space age. The difference between terrestrial debris and space debris is that the latter travels at a speed of five miles per second. An object of one kilo traveling at this speed causes greater damage than one kilo of TNT.

Every time space trash collides space trash, more trash is born out of the impact. In 2009 two satellites, one relaying phone calls, and the other a defunct Russian communications center crashed and splintered into approximately 2,100 pieces. Though the crash’s immediate effects were small, resulting in dropped phone calls, the event proved correct Kessler’s theory.

A few dropped phone calls might not be alarming collateral, but what about the billion dollar International Space Station? The ISS has had too many encounters with lethal trash for the Kessler Effect to be taken lightly. 2010 saw two close calls when chunks of expired satellites zoomed within a mile’s reach of the ISS—each big enough to completely decimate the laboratory.

And space trash is not just dangerous in space. Just like a plastic water bottle tossed to the ground, space trash eventually has no other way to go but down. There are approximately 20,000 chunks of trash bigger than softballs in the space junkyard and over half a million the size of marbles.

Indeed, with time, the stew of trash high above us becomes more and more lethal. For every space trash collision increases the chances of further collisions, making the cosmic shore a minefield that even Han Solo would find difficult to navigate. — Robin Kilmer

For more information read Space Debris: When Will We Clean Up Our Act? in the Huffington Post and Wired Magazine’s The Looming Space Junk Crisis: It’s Time to Take Out the Trash