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Comment by rocknor | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile USA has 25x the debris (as of June 2019). Glass houses...

https://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/quarterly-news/pdfs/odqnv...

https://www.businessinsider.in/us-russia-china-and-india-sta...

I think the concern is that despite increased activity in space, most countries have slowed down the amount of dangerous debris being created.

Meanwhile, India created about as much space junk in a day as the US creates in 1-2 years. That's despite claiming that the the test was in an orbit that wouldn't leave any longterm debris.

Easy to criticize other countries when you've already had your space race.

I do find it annoying that space is usually jingoistic bullshit involving flags and rousing speeches instead of actual science. I'm glad ESA never went that way.

Absolutely. It's the same in case of climate change, easy to criticize other countries about their emissions when you've already had your industrial revolution. I mean, just look at this graph:

https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$state$entities$show$countr...

I also agree with your point that sometimes space achievements are used for jingoistic purposes. But if you see the bigger picture (which most people don't sadly) you realize that it is a net positive overall for science and humanity. The jingoistic aspect is just a consequence of political reality.

I think you should focus on the huge amount of garbage and carbon emissions produced everyday in the USA (biggest contributor to climate change), which is objectively a much bigger problem than this one-off event which media portrayed as some sort of catastrophe. It's "glass houses" all over again. Why should a nation of 350M people have ASAT capability in the interest of national security, but not a nation of 1.4B people? We're seeing what happens when power is concentrated in the hands of a few (Trump/Parler bans) and it cannot be allowed to happen at a geopolitical level, in the interest of world peace (it sounds crazy but it has worked post WW2).

Satellites help us fight climate change

It's possible to care about more than one thing at a time. It's also possible to take a broader look at a problem such as arms control and say that in the long term the proliferation of capabilities is detrimental to humanity as a whole and ask how we can make progress in the other direction. Sadly with nationalism still trending upwards in much of the world I recognise this is a difficult propsition at the moment.

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