[JumpCrisscross]

> It is a very real possibility

It's really not. Not in the popularly-portrayed manner. Militaries have been researching how to intentionally cause such a cascade in even a limited orbit. To my knowledge, there isn't a solution.

[chris_va]

It's a very real possibility, it's just a very slow exponential.

If you have 100,000 satellites, and each collision produces 50,000 pieces of shrapnel with some distribution of altitudes and atmospheric drag, it's not that hard to do the math. The cinematic portrayal of cascading failure (ala the movie Gravity) is completely insane, but that doesn't mean this isn't a real problem on a 100 year timescale.

[JumpCrisscross]

> If you have 100,000 satellites, and each collision produces 50,000 pieces of shrapnel with some distribution of altitudes and atmospheric drag, it's not that hard to do the math

One, it is. And two, you need insane distributions to get over the energy requirements of plane changes.

> on a 100 year timescale

Irrelevant in LEO.