alt Hacker NewsAlready it’s getting hard to avoid noticing satellite trains when stargazing with the naked eye. If mega-constellations really scale into the hundreds of thousands, it feels like we’re on track to permanently degrade the night sky, even in places without much light pollution.
With mega-constellation launches accelerating, the sci‑fi premise of imprisoning ourselves behind a debris field feels less fictional. This is essentially the collision-cascade risk described by Kessler Syndrome
Kurzgesagt has a good explainer. Hopefully we never trigger it.
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In summer I was lying on a beach in Thailand and used an app on my phone to look at things in the sky. Pretty much every moving glistening object I could see was a Starlink satellite. I know nothing about how their constellation works but I wonder why so many are needed. Surely you only need one or two in line of sight for it to work? I was seeing many more than that.
> the sci‑fi premise of imprisoning ourselves behind a debris field feels less fictional
Yeah, no, the numbers don't work for this. The Kessler syndrome is bad, and worth avoiding, but you aren't trapped.
The trick is that you're not staying. Suppose a comms satellite in LEO would, as a result of a hypothetical cascade like this, be destroyed on average in six months but your space vehicle to somewhere else passes through the debris field in like 5 minutes. So your risk is like one in 50 000. That's not good but it wouldn't stop us from leaving.
The reason humans won't leave is more boring and less SF, there is nowhere to go. Nowhere else is anywhere close to habitable, this damp rock is where we were born and it's where we will die, we should take better care of it.