If you're the kind of person who follows me, you may know about the Kessler Syndrome.
That's when collisions between satellites and space junk create enough debris to cause *more* collisions, leading to a runaway chain reaction. This could render certain regions of near-Earth space unusable!
It's one of nature's ways of containing stupid civilizations, sort of like how inflammation contains infections. So don't be surprised:
A new study by Lewis and Kessler argues that we've hit the "runaway threshold" - the point where a chain reaction is expected - at nearly all altitudes between 520 and 1000 kilometers.
Below that, or above that, space could remain usable. So we could still get out and ruin other layers of space - or go to other planets and mess up those. Luckily, planned deployments of large satellite constellations like Starlink, Amazon's Project Kuiper, etc. will reduce the risk of such a breakout.
Yes, I'm joking - we can differ on whether the expansion of stupidity into the cosmos would be a good or bad thing compared to a mostly dead cosmos, and I don't really have an opinion on that. But the study is for real, and worth checking out:
• Hugh G. Lewis and Donald J. Kessler, Critical number of spacecraft in low Earth orbit: a new assessment of the stability of the orbital debris environment, https://conference.sdo.esoc.esa.int/proceedings/sdc9/paper/305/SDC9-paper305.pdf
Thanks to @michael_w_busch for pointing this out.
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John Carlos Baez
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