my favorite part is that humans have created an orbiting pile of garbage.
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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Yeah, but it’s pretty cool that the orbiting pile of garbage can dodge space debris…
Ah, the new Lemmy switcharoo!
Hold my garbage, I'm going in!
A lot of the debris is man made that we put up there is my point.
Now there’s a bunch more of it was my joke.
The only solution? Put more of it up there, of course!
Does space debris have any known natural predators?
Yes, other space debris.
And gravity.
Atmosphere. Gravity just helps smash them against it.
Even without an atmosphere, gravity would pull the debris to crash into the planet itself.
It's in orbit, meaning it's moving so fast that "gravity keeps pulling the debris but it keeps missing the ground". Without an external force, it would just keep orbiting.
Some pieces might collide from time to time, transferring momentum, which occasionally would make some pieces fall down and others fly away, but that would take a very long time.
What's far much faster, is the fact that Earth's atmosphere reaches as far as twice the orbit of the Moon in an extremely diluted form, slowing down anything passing through it... and particularly stuff in low earth orbit that's 1000x times closer to the surface.
I see, I'd thought gravity was the larger force in orbital decay. But then, the atmosphere doesn't exist without gravity, so I still say gravity :P
Hehe, fair point.
Although on another level, the atmosphere extends so far only because some high temperature molecules got flung out that far due to being the outliers in the temperature game, which mostly comes from solar radiation. So it's also the Sun 🌞😎
Not content with trashing the surface of Earth, now we have to trash the space around us too!
Have we created orbiting poles of garbage, or are WE in fact orbiting piles of garbage?
The answer to your question is yes
Maybe we should clean up space?
For the most part, they all are falling towards earth and will burn up. No need to do anything.
Great. Another $900 million wasted. We could have laid a lot of fiber with that money.
Nah, there would have been another stock buyback and the existing "shitty DSL meets all of the FCC requirements for broadband Internet access" would have closed out another hearing.
I detect no lies.
Running fiber globaly is very expensive. The satellite solution has its cons, but it's available to a lot of people who otherwise might not have access.
It is expensive, but in SOME rural areas it's still affordable. Obviously not in poorer ones, but it might get cheaper over time. Or it might not. Who knows.
I recall that the decaying orbit means that they constantly have to put more satellites up. All that energy, all that propellant, and all that space garbage. Billions of dollars wasted. Better spent on fiber. Once installed, baring cuts, it will last for nearly 100 years or more. It has benefits for some, but, IMHO, resources are better spent on fiber.
Universal global fiber is sadly unlikely to happen. I wish it wasn't so, but the fight for me to get fiber in a town has been a decade.
I spent five years and gave up on it because Republicans.
Different country here, I'm getting it in autumn.
Humans who punch down have no borders.
True. We've just managed to keep ours mostly in check. It helps that they scored multiple blunders before the last election, otherwise it would've been scary.
Kessler syndrome is one hell of a lot more expensive than fiber.
These are in LEO. Once they lose propulsion after 3-5 years, they fall and burn up on re-entry. It isn't possible for these satellites to cause Kessler Syndrome.
Could a high-speed impact not send debris flying into a higher orbit?
It could send debris into a more elliptical orbit, but it wouldn't be possible for it to raise the entire orbit above LEO. The point of impact will remain in the orbital path and since the entire orbit is currently in LEO, there will be, by extension, some part of the new orbit still in LEO and therefore subject any debris to atmospheric capture.
I guess we can choose between people in remote areas having no internet access and Kessler syndrome :/
The third way costs not 900 million, but hundreds of billions, maybe trillions. Rich countries can afford it, but many can not.
Wasted how? Because some satellites moved to dodge debris?
Fiber is too slow when you want to charge billions for letting High Frequency Trading bots running arbitration across different markets to get a few miliseconds advantage over those running through fiber.
Having a mesh of satellites running on "laser through vacuum" to go around the globe, can get you those billions. Which, let's be clear, is the real business goal of Starlink.
Perhap we should focus on cleaning up earth first :-)
Will need one very powerful vacuum to do that.
Make sure it doesn't go from suck to blow!
After being warned repeatedly since 2014. Whee.
Is it just Starlink satellites going through this?
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