| >It’s not a collision estimation tool. Agreed, but then why did you say it gets less "scary" when you realize the size is exaggerated here? What else could you be scared of, if you're not (implicitly) using the visualization to estimate collision probability? Some sort of thalassephobia for giant space objects, perhaps? >probability is very low Now keep rolling those dice every day for hundreds or thousands of years. Thousands of dice, for thousands of objects. People are historically bad at imagining that (just like we're bad at large distances), which is why compressing the duration is misleading. Risk = probability * cost. The cost of collisions (both the immediate cost and the long-term cost from additional debris generation) is very high. >There is nothing scary about the probability of collision If you watch the video I linked earlier, it explains how we're already past the "tipping point." Even if all launches cease (spoiler: they won't), the debris problem would continue to get worse. Maybe that isn't a scary situation to you, but it is to me. |
It’s a comment about how full it is, not about how likely things are to collide and a reply to a previous comment.
> Now keep rolling those dice every day for hundreds of years. Thousands of dice, for thousands of objects.
Still low.
Orbits between 700km and 800km are mostly lost after the past two decade antisatellites tests. Lower orbits clean fast especially the ones used by the recent large satellites fleet and space above 800km is mostly empty apart from the band with large USSR boosters which is easy to avoid.
Risk is not very high. It is managed adequately and the legislation is properly anticipating current developments.
It’s important to remember that space is extremely large and we are talking about thousands of things. Having too much debris clustered in a small range of altitude makes it not economically viable to operate there but it doesn’t prevent us from going through at all.