Pete Tannen| Sarasota Herald-Tribune

The Egyptians left pyramids. The Romans left roads and aqueducts. The Aztecs left temples.

And what are we, who describe ourselves as the most intelligent life on the planet, leaving?

Garbage. And lots of it. Just take a look at our moon.

Even though just 12 people have ever walked on its surface, they left behind more than 200 tons of trash including threemoon buggies, four armrests, lots of empty food bags, backpacks, blankets, packing material and even twogolf balls hit by astronaut Alan Shephard (he used a 6-iron).

Then theres our space garbage.

Sure, its exciting to send astronauts and millionaire tourists and satellites into space, but the amount of trash we leave up there is appalling more than 250,000 pieces of orbital debris are now circling our planet!

This junk includes over 3,000 totally dead or outdated satellites, thousands of old rocket fragments, hundreds of assorted nuts and bolts, tools accidentally dropped by astronauts, gloves accidentally dropped by astronauts, something scientists described as an empty trash bag object . . .etc.

In fact, its gotten so crowded up there that pieces of space junk are now rocketing around the planet, randomly smashing into other pieces of junk and some of them travel at more than15,000 miles per hour and can cause serious damage to anything they hit.

Even the International Space Station has to constantly shift its course to avoid getting hit by stray pieces of old satellites or other garbage.

And what are we doing about all this? So far, nothing.Except possibly providing material for some Ph.D candidate of the future, whose doctoral thesis could well be titled Humans: the Airheads of the Galaxy."

Unless youre a garbologist,we can all agree that its way past time to clean up this mess.

(Note: In case this is a new concept for you, a garbologist is one who studies culture and human behavior through the analysis of what is thrown away as garbage.)

Some garbologists believe the monuments, buildings, statues and art that cultures leave behind are just self-aggrandizing advertisements.Garbage, on the other hand, is a kind of tattletalethat sets the record straight.

Just thought you should know.

A resident of Sarasota, Pete Tannen is an award-winning humor writer,newspaper columnist andTV show writer. He is also arenowned Senior Influencer."

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We humans love our garbage - from the moon and back - Sarasota Herald-Tribune