Suppose that somehow these cellophane wrappers then became evenly distributed across the solar system. It would be utterly beyond the reach of current technology for a scientist based on Mars to detect any evidence of those cellophane wrappers. At bottom, the mental failure here is a failure of imagination, an insistence on applying common sense rules of thumb to intellectual contexts where they no longer apply. The sun is near the earth the same way the gas station is near my house. We see the same kind of failure at the heart of many other controversies.
Evolution offers a prime example.
The other day I was explaining hominid evolution during the last 3 million years to a friend. Suppose we had two photos, one of me, and one of Fred Homo Erectus from three million years ago. Suppose further that we use a morphing program to morph Fred's photo into mine. But, suppose that we did this morphing process in 150,00 steps, because there are 150,000 generations between Fred and myself. It was a failure of her imagination to appreciate the vastness of evolutionary time.