Stanislaw Lem on entropy (littering) Littering in space had been a concern long before Elon Musk's Starlink programme, and various methods for cleaning up the growing clutter in Earth's orbit are currently under discussion. The task is not easy because - due to the second law, the inevitable increase in entropy - all littering tends to increase exponentially. If one of the thousands of pieces of scrap metal in space is hit by another piece of scrap metal, the one piece that was hit creates many new pieces that fly around at insane speeds. Space pollution is therefore a self-perpetuating