Declan McVeigh

Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. It’s 1am on a Sunday and the hotel bar several floors below my apartment has taken advantage of the cooler winter weather to temporarily reinvent itself as a nightclub. As loud, percussive thumps rise up and ricochet off the complex’s three towers, the space in between becomes a canyon filled with reverberating noise. The volume is enough to overwhelm distractions such as reading or watching TV. As for sleep, forget it.

It seems that in outer space, as it is on Earth, humanity is simply leaving far too much of its trash behind. According to a report released in April by the European Space Agency, the organisation is tracking about 54,000 pieces of orbital debris larger than 10cm. There are an additional 1.2 million fragments measuring between one and 10cm. These bits and pieces may not sound like much at first - the cosmos is a big place - but as far back as the late 1970s, scientists were already worried.

On August 26, 1982, Francie McCluskey, a 46-year-old father of eight, was shot six times in the head and chest as he crossed some waste ground on his way to work in north Belfast. Loyalist paramilitaries later claimed responsibility for what detectives said was a purely sectarian killing, one of thousands in Northern Ireland's decades-long Troubles.