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by krisoft 722 days ago
When you are worrying about this, are you looking at visualisations or are you looking at the real sky?
2 comments

The real sky. Go and look out tonight after dusk and you'll see satellite after satellite.
I'd like to see the ratio of volume used up by satellites vs. volume of the earth's atmosphere between the highest and lowest flying satellite.

I wonder if it's something like the volume an ant would take up in an average American house, where nobody would care about it.

Apparently it's like colliding with one specific ant in a place much bigger than the Empire State Building. Or against one of thousands of pieces of an ant in such a building while being the size of a very tiny fraction of an ant.

The risk isn't the night sky becoming a blob of manmade tech, that probably won't ever happen; the real problem with these satellites (and other things we launch into the atmosphere like telescopes) is that when they get damaged, their debris effectively becomes dangerous, fast moving trash that has to be taken into account for every future space object launch. (Which has a compounding effect since if something goes wrong, you now have new and exciting debris to monitor and be careful with.)

Launch too many and you can essentially create an invisible blanket for the next 15 or so years (depending on re-entry time; without some technical innovations in this field, this used to be upwards of several centuries, but that's gotten better - Starlink's re-entry is 5 years for it's satellites if memory serves me right, but the industrial standard is 15-20 years - this has the extra downside that apparently their satellites don't burn up properly, having damaged properties and people in the past. Their fleet size also apparently risks halting the recovery of the gap in the ozone layer with the mass re-entry) that will prevent any kind of space exploration simply because there's no safe zone in which you can launch anything without crashing into a space object/space debris.

It's indeed like colliding with an ant, but that ant also moves at a speed comparable to a fired bullet. Even something as tiny as a screw that got loose and is now orbiting as debris can absolutely wreck other space objects at the speed those things move in the atmosphere.