Polluting LEO to the point where we endanger our ability to get off the earth is extremely myopic.
Not a notable risk here. All this debris is short-term. If the Chinese satellite had been at the same altitude, all its debris would be long gone by now.
Sure. Just that the "we" cannot be one of the nations that did this before, as is the case here. That's hypocrisy and entitlement.
Just because other people did something stupid doesn't make it not stupid.
Why not? The US is the only nation to have used nuclear weapons in a war, and we even nuked space in 1962, more or less just to see what happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime . I don't see why that disqualifies either me, or the US government, from criticizing these things.
In other words Kesseler syndrome does not create some sort of impassable barrier -- in the above analog imagine your risk of getting hit by a car if you stand in one place for 30 seconds - again, basically 0. It just makes collisions, over the longrun, more likely to occur between orbiting bodies. There's absolutely no risk of impairing our ability to get off Earth -- just our ability to circle around it for years in fixed orbits. And in reality, I think it's almost certain we'll eventually see a Kessler syndrome type event. The first thing two capable nations involved in an armed conflict would do is to destroy each others' satellites, resulting in a severe mutual crippling of both offensive and defensive capabilities (as well as civil chaos - imagine if GPS/comms were all taken out tomorrow!) at very low cost. So the only way we do not see a Kessler Syndrome type event is if there's literally never a significant armed conflict between any of US/Russia/China/India, and whatever other future nations develop this technology. The odds of that seem to be pretty much 0.
The China's example is there because it puts the threat mentioned in the title into a perspective.
We definitely shouldn't destroy any satellites, but we already did. I don't see a reason not to compare them when we discuss how big is the threat.
EDIT: to those who downvote this comment, I'd love an explanation why you think I shouldn't make this comparison. As far as I know, no country destroyed more than one, so how else am I supposed to compare them?
[Country] did [bad thing] that affected [everyone/other countries]
It's to the point that there's typically limited discussion about the topic itself and a lot of back and forth whataboutism.
Also, HN finds usage of “whataboutism” a cliche perpetuated by The Last Week Tonight (John Oliver).
It is whataboutism. I don’t give a shit if it was perpetuated by some TV show. What matters is that HN needs to stop comparisons and distracting the conversation to historical artifacts “oh look, US engaged in Slavery 150 years ago so it is unfair to criticize working conditions at Foxconn”.
We need to stop doing this guys.
tl;dr HN is great at some things, and for the rest is just as good or bad as the rest of the internet, just with less humor and self-awareness.
There are subreddits that are higher quality for specific topics, but you have to go hunting to find them.
Of course if you compare HN to /politics then HN is vastly superior, but then if you compare the average non-technical thread here to anything in /science HN comes off the worse for it. Even putting aside ideological pissing matches bikeshedding, semantic arguments and language wars, you get a lot of weird self-help stuff here that would be funny if people weren’t so desperately sincere about it.