Litter is an ongoing problem on Earth, but it also appears to be an issue in outer space.  Since we have been technologically capable, we have been littering our cosmic backyard with almost every mission into space that has created new debris, either from the launch vehicles, objects falling off satellites or unintended collisions. Almost 20,000 pieces of space debris are currently orbiting the Earth. University lecturer Stuart Grey has recently posted a 1-minute video that shows the accumulation of junk from 1957, when Sputnik first flew, through to 2015.

This visualization created by Dr Stuart Grey, a lecturer at University College of London and part of the Space Geodesy and Navigation Laboratory, shows how the amount of space debris increased from 1957 to 2015, using data on the precise location of each piece of junk.

It all begins in 1957 when the Soviet Union launches Sputnik, a 58.5-centimeter-wide ball emitting radio pulses. A piece of the rocket that took it into orbit was the very first piece of space junk. Since, then there has been a tremendous increase in the numbers and now these numbers have grown so much that they are threatening space projects and, more importantly, mankind itself.

By the time the USSR launched the first human into space, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, there were 200 objects floating around up there. By 1980, we had landed a man on the moon and left nearly 5000 objects in orbit. And because of deep space exploration, not all of them are tiny.

According to American Space Agency NASA, it currently tracks 20,000 such pieces, mostly from used rocket parts, non-functional satellites, and other objects that are measured to be larger than a softball. It also tracks objects the size of a marble (but smaller than a softball) and has counted about 500,000 such things in space. And then there are millions of other objects that are just too small to monitor.

Even space debris this small can do major damage to unsuspecting spacecraft as they travel at speeds around 17,500 mph. This makes space, even more, dangerous to send humans into.

Check out this video:

The video above was created by Stuart Grey, using data on the precise location of each piece of space junk from space-track.org. Every white dot in the video represents space debris released during space missions.

You may not be safe down on land, either. According to NASA, around one piece of debris has fallen to Earth every day for the last fifty years.