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by throwaway598 776 days ago
We're 16-158 years away from the collapse of easy orbits.
4 comments

I assume you're talking about space junk cluttering up those orbits.

Upscale those laser zappers which are now being fielded to combat drones and put them in high-flying aircraft or on mountaintops. Start zapping the debris and clean out those orbits. Larger pieces of junk can be collected by some iteration of MegaMaid™ (in essence an orbiting Roomba). Problem maybe not directly solved but at least postponed to be either solved this way in a number of years or naturally through orbital decay of circulating junk.

Go to a Lagrange point, the moon or the asteroid belt before that happens.
This is the first time I’m reading of this, why?
I was linked to a paper on this just yesterday.

> The Economics of Orbit Use: Open Access, External Costs, and Runaway Debris Growth (Rao, Rondina, upcoming 2024).

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/730695

And for an arvix/working paper link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.07442v2.pdf

> In our main calibration, Kessler Syndrome can emerge anytime between the year 2040 and the year 2184, with the precise date being very sensitive to the calibration of autocatalytic debris growth parameters.

What does this mean?