We’re putting more stuff into space than ever. Here’s what’s up there.

Earth is a medium-sized rock, draped in water and wrapped in a delicate veil of gases that sustain all life. At the very edge of that protective envelope begins a thin yet increasingly dense layer of human-made, high-tech infrastructure.

It all started in 1957, when the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, pierced the sky. What began as a Cold War milestone has since evolved into a defining feature of our modern world. Telescopes peer deep into the cosmos, while humans reside aboard orbiting metal habitats like the International Space Station. Over the past five years alone, the number of active satellites circling our planet has surged from just under 3,000 to roughly 14,000—and the tally is climbing fast. The driving force? “Megaconstellations” such as Elon Musk’s Starlink, which now operates a fleet of nearly 10,000 satellites to deliver high-speed internet across the globe.

But humanity’s orbital ambitions come with a growing problem: space junk. Around 50,000 fragments larger than a baseball now hurtle through low Earth orbit, accompanied by an estimated one million objects bigger than a coin. For those who rely on weather forecasts, GPS navigation, or digital communication, the threat of collisions is real—and potentially catastrophic. Welcome to Earth’s ever-thickening shell of human-made matter, the anthroposphere, where our technological footprint is now as vast as it is vulnerable.