Professors Clean Out Offices, Causing Space-Junk Nightmare that may End Human Access to the Cosmos

PALO ALTO (RPT) – A growing trend among professors to clean out their offices and send their old journal articles into the earth’s orbit may threaten humanity’s access to space. These hard copies of journal articles are quickly outpacing the hazard from other sources of space-trash including old satellites, dead spacecraft and Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster.

“Accidental collisions of hard copies of articles in the earth’s orbit generates a multitude of tiny pieces of space-junk that can cause a hazard to spacecraft trying to escape from the earth’s orbit,” a NASA scientist told RPT, “if professors keep launching their old journal articles into space, pretty soon there will be no way for us to escape from earth without a fatal crash with potentially outdated and underpowered scientific findings.”

“Given the move towards online publication, there just isn’t a need for me to hang onto all these old journals and hard-copy preprints of my papers,” a leading academic told RPT, “they were taking up a lot of space in my office and it was too hard to just throw them away - so I decided instead to launch them into outer space instead.” Another professor at the same institution commented, “I’m not worried about the space-trash problem, I think having all these old journal articles in orbit around the earth will inspire people about the possibility of something new happening in space.”