alt Hacker News> don't know how to sell the urgency of this predicament
We need to start by understanding it. I'm having trouble finding this paper right now. But to date, all calculations have shown that Kessler syndrome as a generalised phenomenon is incredibly hard to trigger. Even intentionally. Especially in LEO. (Intentionally triggering it is of interest for strategic ASAT denial.)
> the mass of potential impactors quickly forms a long tailed lognormal distribution that denies us space for centuries
No, it denies certain orbits. (Again, barring some new orbital dynamic haven been discovered by this paper.)
If 800km impacts go asymptotic, it pollutes 700km and 900km orbits by virtue of having a distribution of resulting debris velocity vectors, and as drag pulls down all the resulting debris over the next thousand years, the 800km debris becomes circular 700km debris, and then circular 600km debris, and then circular 500km debris.