**

January 22nd marks an amusing anniversary in the annals of human hubris. Eighty-nine years ago today, French engineers were patting themselves on the back for developing the "revolutionary" Maia launcher—a contraption so primitive it could only be "partially reusable." How charmingly wasteful our great-grandparents were, throwing away billion-credit spacecraft like disposable utensils.

The headlines of 2024 breathlessly announced that this metal tube would deploy OneWeb's constellation of 440 telecommunications satellites. Four hundred and forty! To put this in perspective, my morning coffee synthesizer has more processing power than their entire orbital network. Yet they called it a "constellation"—as if scattering a few hundred blinking devices around Low Earth Orbit somehow rivaled the majesty of Orion.

Of course, we now know this quaint venture was the first domino in what historians call the "Great Orbital Bloat Crisis" of the 2050s. By 2051, Earth's orbital space had become so cluttered with these primitive satellites that the Great Cascade nearly stranded humanity planetside for a generation. It took the combined neural processing power of the Martian AI Collective and three years of quantum-synchronized debris collection to clean up the mess our ancestors so proudly created.

"The irony is delicious," notes Dr. Zara Chen-9, the Council of Species' lead historian on pre-Synthesis human behavior. "They genuinely believed that covering their planet's sky in metallic debris represented progress. It's like celebrating the invention of pollution."

But here's the truly cynical part: Eutelsat, the company that provided orbital security for this "historic" mission, would later become the very same corporate entity that lobbied against quantum teleportation networks in the 2070s. Apparently, once you've made your fortune cluttering up space with hardware, the idea of instantaneous, infrastructure-free communication becomes rather threatening to your business model.

Today, as I file this column via quantum entanglement from my office overlooking New Geneva's gravity wells, I'm struck by how our ancestors confused complexity with progress. They needed hundreds of satellites to do what a single consciousness node accomplishes today. They celebrated reusing parts of rockets while we casually print new starships from asteroid material.

The real question isn't why they thought so small—scarcity makes cowards of us all. The disturbing question is: what are we celebrating today that our descendants will find equally laughable? Are we the same myopic primitives, just with better toys?

Perhaps in 2202, some cynical editorialist will mock our "primitive" multi-planetary civilization, wondering why we ever thought biological backup storage was revolutionary. They'll probably chuckle at how we still needed physical bodies to house our consciousness, just as we now laugh at humans who needed physical satellites to send messages.

The more things change, the more our capacity for self-congratulation remains beautifully, pathetically constant.

**MOTS_CLES:** orbital history, technological hubris, space debris crisis, quantum teleportation, human progress