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by orbital-decay 266 days ago
Some kind of a relative velocity at the closest approach or a collision probability overlay would be way more useful to have than proper scale. That would make it immediately clear that lazy well-kept orbits like GEO are much safer than e.g. 567km SSO at the poles. Or some color coding for the apparent magnitude.
1 comments

While I totally agree with the logic, this particular visualization might mislead unsuspecting viewers into believing that our LEO is almost fully saturated. In reality, the satellites are so small that they would miss each other even if placed on the same orbit.
A true-to-scale visualization would however be entirely misleading for everyone since it would be completely empty. Just look up in the sky at a clear sky. You would hardly see a single satelite and a visualization on a computer screen would show even less due to pixel size.