[jl6]

There’s a lot of junk but it’s spread out over a lot of space. You probably won’t catch much by accident. Also, it may be going dramatically faster than your catcher, in which case it would be less like a mitten catching a ball and more like a mitten catching a bullet.

[f-word]

Sure, but there's also a lot of uh mitten in this case, getting progressively denser as more stuff gets trapped in it. I don't think there's that many ways to trap all the tons of hyperfast shrapnel we've up up there, unless we can get starlink to just sporadically throw small nets around in hopes of catching enough junk on any given throw?

[jerf]

No, your "mitten" is getting blown apart, not getting progressively stronger. Your intuition is not tuned for space. Imagine trying to strengthen a structure by firing extremely high-powered bullets at it. "I have a tree near my house that is about to fall on us... how should I fire my high-powered rifle at it to reinforce it so it stays up?"

[f-word]

Right, so what's your solution then?

[jerf]

Who says I have a solution? Or that there even is one?

[londons_explore]

I suspect if you did the analysis, you'd find rather than it getting denser over time, you'd find most bits of space debris (even tiny ones) would have enough energy to explode your catcher...