End of Space – Creating a Prison for Humanity

What people said

bicepjai · 2026-01 · Recommendation

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. [VIDEO]

Read the original HN comment ↗

GoMonad · 2020-06 · Recommendation

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

Read the original HN comment ↗

snuxoll · 2020-01 · Recommendation

> 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 actually has a great video on the topic of space debris for anyone interested: [VIDEO]

Read the original HN comment ↗