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until the kessler effect traps is on this ever-heating rock
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LEO is not the place to worry about Kessler syndrome.

Mostly, Kessler syndrome isn’t something to worry about at all; there are just a lot of orbital planes available. But in LEO, the mechanics don’t even apply.

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Not to be alarmist, but suppose a galactic federation judges that humans in their current state of development will pose a danger to other civilizations when they imminently attain warp capability, so as a safety precaution they need to be confined to their planet for at least a millennium. An agent of the federation posing as human manipulates the population into allowing 100,000 satellites to be deployed. With that done, federation scientists solve the many-body problem for the exact necessary speed and trajectory of a small meteor to shatter one of the satellites such that some of its fragments precisely target its neighboring satellites, and so on, while the rest get kicked up into higher orbits. Life goes on but any enterprise that depends on penetrating the debris field becomes infeasible.
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Why is that?
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Depends on how you define LEO. I think the commenter was probably thinking of Very Low Earth Orbit, VLEO.

First graph is a list of deorbit times: https://www.nasa.gov/smallsat-institute/sst-soa/deorbit-syst...

As expected, higher altitudes, higher mass, and lower surface areas correlate to longer deorbit times. It looks like altitude has an extreme effect on deorbit times, as you can see the 100 KG satellite (solar min) deorbits in a little under 2 years at 400 KM, but over 15 years at 500 KM. So 1.25x the altitude results in 7.5x the deorbit time.

Stuff at 800-1000 KM can take centuries to deorbit, and that's within both NASA's (under 2000 KM) and the ESA's (under 1000 KM) definitions of LEO. There is a definition for VLEO of under 450 KM, which would have fairly short deorbit times, and therefore a relatively mild Kessler Syndrome.

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Indeed. It's something investors should worry about for the data centres and if SpaceX will bankrupt itself instead of giving them a return on their investments, but it's not something where general space enthusiasts should worry about Starlink: the timescale for orbital decay is long enough to kill a company, but short compared to a lifetime.
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Because LEO is a degrading orbits, meaning that the satelites fall out of orbit after a few years on their own.
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Hope for what?

For less starving people? For less child abuse? For less climate change?

I look up at the night sky and i want to see stars and the endlessness of the universe and don't want to be reminded that Elon Musk will poisen our atmosphere.

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> For less starving people? For less child abuse? For less climate change?

Yes. The only way to truly solve these issues is technological progress.

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Not really, all three of them are sociological problems. And, at least for the first and last, we could already have mostly solved them but for the intransigent insanity of various political cults.

It's not technological progress we need; it's cultural progress.

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Logistics of food distribution is a technological problem, and nowadays famines tend to happen less due to absolute shortage of food in a wider region, rather than due to insufficiently developed transport infrastructure.

IIRC no place in the world which has hard-paved highways has ever seen a peacetime famine. That's almost exclusively the domain of mud road territories. Of course, this is partly a correlation (mud road territories have worse governance and more banditry), but there is causality as well.

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Well the only thing that has ever solved starvation is improved technology, child abuse I think has nothing to do with satellites, and managing climate change requires massive energy and technology resources especially in space.

So clearly you are in favor of starvation and human suffering due to climate change because of your irrational distaste for seeing satellites in orbit.

I suspect the root cause is you've overdosed on propaganda on the internet.

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How is Elon Musk going to poison our atmosphere?
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The Starlink satellites burn up in the atmosphere as they end their useful life. The metals that the satellites are made up of don't vanish in the thin air up there. They burn and just hang up there. Now, whether or not this is an impending disaster is for you to decide, but that's the theory of it.
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