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Comment by greatgib | Hacker News Reader

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These have to de orbit at end of life. Junkyard might be the wrong analogy. More like busy workyard. Or highway.

I just cross the fingers to not witness a Kessler syndrome : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

Kessler cascades as depicted in Gravity aren’t really possible [1]. Instead, a Kessler cascade would proceed linearly, within a tight orbit, and over the course of decades if not centuries. In LEO, the timeline for a Kessler cascade is on the order of natural decay times.

[1] https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/features/understanding-the...

You'll be long dead before it matters.

It's comments like these that sadden me. It's this mindset that make me pessimistic about the long-term viability of humanity as I think it is shared among many people. When we (individuals/groups/society) don't plan far ahead (even for the loosest sense/meaning of the word "plan"), that will tend to lead to short-term benefits with long-term detriments. That even applies even for things that can occur past our lifespan. In my opinion, we should strive to benefit/help our decedents. Climate change is the most obvious case of this, but it applies to other cases like solar flares on the scale of the Carrington event or greater or like Kessler syndrome here (both perhaps on the order of hundreds of years). If Kessler syndrome is a legitimate concern to be a problem in the not crazy distant future, we shouldn't dismiss it outright just because the issue is unlikely to be a problem within our lifetime.

There's no incentive to do this, it's politically untenable to plan that far ahead. The beauty of humanity is we're always changing and evolving because we only do things within the scope of our lifetime.

The curse of humanity is having a brain that lets us think too hard about what we want to be rather than acknowledging what we are which is a bunch of mortal animals with finite time spans that like to fuck, make babies, raise families and occasionally we come together and do shit together in the form of work so we can further those three other priorities.

> The beauty of humanity is we're always changing and evolving because we only do things within the scope of our lifetime.

This is just simply not true. For thousands of years, humans have done things that are meant to endure beyond our lifetimes - from building monuments like the the pyramids to conducting scientific research to creating art. Our ability to look beyond the here and now is actually one of the defining characteristics of humanity.

What do you make of the million buildings, devices, ideas and techniques left to us by those that came before?

We better make double-sure than any leftover value past your life is purely meted out through hereditary lines and couldn't possibly benefit any but a tiny minority of people. Like, if you had three houses and two kids at death, there ain't no way some poor fool is getting that leftover house for free!

Legislation would certainly require political will, which we don't have now for tackling anything on such a time scale. To tackle the problem through laws and government enforcement, it would have to become politically tenable at some point, but how would we go from where we are now to something that is closer to this? It's difficult to say with any confidence. But I do know politicians are still human, influenced by their biases and beliefs inherited through biology and life experiences. If our future politicians are to grow up in an environment in which a larger (than today) proportion of people care about problems on a longer time scale, they are more likely to care as well. Consequently, a larger proportion of individuals getting into politics will care about these types of problems, increasing the likelihood of them being addressed.

In parallel but as a separate point, fewer people will be willing to use products or services provided by organizations that they believe are doing wrong or harm by contributing to such problems, thus making it less profitable within capitalism. We already see this to some degree today (Harry Potter comes to mind). Even if the reduction in customers and profit is small, it would decrease compounding and ever so slightly disincentivize the company from making such a pursuit.

It's impressive how adaptive humans are, I must admit. We are quite good at tackling problems we see right in front of us if we set our minds to it. But that doesn't mean we should dismiss problems that are not causing an issue right here and now. We shouldn't wait until it becomes an actual problem because there could be irreversible consequences (or rather, we cannot reverse on reasonable timescale).

That's what they thought in the 70s when they discovered climate change. Look where we are now. Is basic concern for others a sin in our current world?

We're living out the consequences of a system where the Nash equilibrium is everyone maximizing their individual benefit at the expense of all else. And that extends to being an unapologetic jerk--as long as that face looks like a stepping stone, climb on. And screw future people and animals.

Move fast and break things.

Try to be dead before you have to pay for it.

The "hacker ethic" has been redefined.

burning the ozone layer in every reentry. ah the marvel of offset costs.

Satellite constellations account for a negligible 0.01% of human ozone depletion. It's viral misinformation that there's a rallying-cry issue here.

We may need all the ozone possible to offset global warming.

I'm unsure what you mean by that; and ozone itself is a greenhouse gas[0,1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing#/media/File:...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone#Ozone_as_a_greenhouse_ga...

Late update: if you look at the fancy full version of the IPCC graphs[0], there's a funny (ehh...) observation: the human destruction of stratospheric ozone was one of the largest climate radiative forcing factors—and it was on the "cooling" side!

[0] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/technical-summary/figts-0...

It's the negative-side, green (O₃) bar in the third row, "halocarbons". There's multiple human contributions to ozone I don't fully understand, but, *that* one's the stratospheric ozone destruction due to CFC's. (That's not to to say CFC's were good for the climate: as that same row illustrates, CFC's themselves are also ultrapotent greenhouse gases. If you trust the fancy graph, the CFC's direct heating effect slightly outweighed their cooling effect via destroying ozone).

It's hard to internalize just how big space is. Low Earth Orbit has nearly twice the surface area of Earth. These LEO constellations (Kuiper and Starlink) are trying to put one object the size of a car per each area the size of Rhode Island. We're a long way away from junkyards.

And every country as well.

I doubt we’ll end up with 200+ of these consolations in 100 years. Probably not even 20.

It’s just a physics problem. Rocket launches are expensive from an energy standpoint. These satellites will have a decaying orbit that requires replacement. It won’t look appealing to most net-importers of energy (which is most countries, but the whole EU might bear the cost for one network for strategic reasons).

Not to mention most countries just don’t operate enough military assets outside of their borders to justify their own network. Non-military applications will be just fine with E2E encryption over public channels. More localized military operations can have communication needs served other ways.

It’s not big corps. Interns. Student projects. I make software typically used in the space industry and our customers are surprisingly small, just s dozen people each time. Startups, half of them funded by the EU startup funds.

The kilogram in orbit is supposed to go down to $1000, and everyone’s joking that it becomes affordable to send a turd to space “for the lulz”. It’s literally the case.

Ariane 5G is already down to 10k$/kg, Falcon 9 is at 6500k$, pricing on https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/ and you can literally click “Buy” and enter your credit card number.

I see a minimum price of $325k

I don't think a student is going to be able to afford that any time soon

I think it’s cheaper for student groups. If you google “student club sends satellite” you get a bunch of examples,

https://globalnews.ca/news/9818771/university-of-saskatchewa...

https://news.northeastern.edu/2024/09/16/satellite-developme...

https://www.utoronto.ca/news/launch-its-first-satellite-stud...

etc

SpaceX isn’t providing a discount to student groups. The program, Cubesat Launch Initiative, is funded by NASA and covers the cost of launch and integration into the deployer.

325k$ is for 50kg. Yes it’s the minimum for this program. The students I had were programming the 10cm^3 satellites, I don’t have more details than this cursory explanation but it’s definitely possible.

A cubesat isn't 50kg. Maybe people are subletting a single slot.

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