Comment 2 Birds with one Stone (Score 1) 508
Why don't we kill two birds with one stone.
Build a spacecraft that collects space junk. It would be cheaper to get it off the ground at it's original weight. Then it would hang out in low orbit collecting space junk. Then when the time comes, our careless littering will be what saves us from certain doom.
In 1999, they estimated that there's 4 million pounds of space junk in low-Earth orbit. 20 tons, as in 40,000 pounds, doesn't seem too hard to amass. We can just keep welding, or use some sort of concrete like substance to hold it together.