End of Space – Creating a Prison for Humanity

What Hacker News said

Recommends xvector · 2019-06 · on “Study finds that a GPS outage would cost $1B per day”

No, the issue with space debris is that we are quickly approaching the point where a single unfortunately placed collision could chain using a sort of exponential “shotgun effect”, destroying virtually all satellites at a given orbit and rendering space travel impossible for decades if not centuries, setting human space exploration back significantly as launches have to deal with thousands of metal shards traveling at tens of thousands of mph. See this video[1] by Kurzgesagt: “End of Space - Creating a Prison for Humanity.” [1]: [this video]

Recommends samcday · 2019-07 · on “FCC fines Swarm $900k for unauthorized smallsat launch (2018)”

Kurzgesagt[1] convinced me that space debris will become a real problem if we're not careful. A "Swarm" of fist-sized cubesats whizzing around our planet at a few thousand km/h sounds like a nightmare. [1]: [this video]

Recommends snuxoll · 2020-01 · on “DirecTV races to decommission broken satellite before it explodes”

> A graveyard orbit sounds like it will be flying around up their indefinitely as high speed shrapnel. Does anyone know why they would choose this instead of destroying it on re-entry? Because the ∆v required to re-enter the atmosphere is significantly higher than that required to leave geosynchronous orbit for a higher graveyard orbit. But yes, ultimately it will remain up there as "high speed shrapnel" - which is not an ideal situation, and continuing to treat disposal as we have may put us in a situation where these orbits become so full of high speed garbage that they are unusable. As a species, we need to do more work on cleaning up our space garbage before it's too late. Kurzgesagt act

Recommends GoMonad · 2020-06 · on “Ask HN: What’s a big trend we should all be following?”

Relevant Kurzgesagt [this video] The gist: we could trap ourselves on earth for generations with space debris.

Recommends bicepjai · 2026-01 · on “China applies to put 200K satellites in space after calling Starlink crash risk”

Already it’s getting hard to avoid noticing satellite trains when stargazing with the naked eye. If mega-constellations really scale into the hundreds of thousands, it feels like we’re on track to permanently degrade the night sky, even in places without much light pollution. With mega-constellation launches accelerating, the sci‑fi premise of imprisoning ourselves behind a debris field feels less fictional. This is essentially the collision-cascade risk described by Kessler Syndrome Kurzgesagt has a good explainer. Hopefully we never trigger it. [this video]

Cites sebringj · 2018-11 · on “AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites”

This is cool but now I'm more concerned in learning how launching micro satellites has become so easy for the masses which would be my opposite reaction normally. Meaning this is not without bad side effects. I watched "in a nutshell" about the end of space in that orbiting debris is becoming an issue as its an exponential threat over time as small debris moving at 20 K mph vaporizes things it comes in contact with, hence more debris, more collisions and so forth eventually creating a death shield to any incoming/outgoing space transport, effectively halting space travel for centuries. Here is that video FYI [this video] I don't see how this is helping but possibly there will be cleanup solutions

Cites treebro · 2018-12 · on “Virgin Galactic successfully reaches space”

Found it ironic that Branson called space 'Virgin Territory'. There's a very good possibility that we'd be sending ourselves into the dark ages if space debris goes unmanaged. [this video]

Cites deanCommie · 2019-04 · on “India’s destruction of satellite threatens ISS, says Nasa”

<Deep breath> 1) Whataboutism doesn't help anyone. Two wrongs don't make a right. 2) India has the hindsight of history that the US and earlier Space programs didn't. Humanity did not consider these kinds of things earlier. Space was treated as essentially infinite. We now know better and know that this debree can cause a real threat to future space missions, even in the worst case dooming humanity to Earth as a prison[1]. By the way, the same applies to carbon emissions. Yes, the West got to industrialize by rampantly polluting the world. No, that doesn't mean China and India get a free pass for it. Also, to the exploitation of countries/economies/people below you on the totem pole. Again,