4 ms·
Space is vast... far bigger than you're imagining. Probably the best analogy, that I've heard, to put your mind at ease: think about how many cars are on the ro
by Denzel 8y ago
Space is vast... far bigger than you're imagining. Probably the best analogy, that I've heard, to put your mind at ease: think about how many cars are on the road today.
There are about 1 billion cars.
Is the surface of Earth crowded?
Well, not only is the surface area of a single sphere in low-earth orbit (LEO) bigger than the surface area of Earth, you have to remember we're dealing with volume. We can move in three dimensions and thus there are many "surfaces".
There's an order of magnitude more space for things in space. ;)
We're not even going to get close to delivering 1 billion objects to orbit anytime soon. And even then, it wouldn't be crowded.
- jessriedel 8y agoThis is true, but the very high orbital speeds means there can be a surprisingly high frequency of collisions even at extremely low density.
- Denzel 8y agoThat's also true. Do you have any material I could read on how this frequency increases with the rate of spacecrafts deployed?
- schiffern 8y agoA good place to start might be the original paper by Donald Kessler, "Collision Frequency of Artificial Satellites: The Creation of a Debris Belt" http://webpages.charter.net/dkessler/files/Collision%20Frequency.pdf http://webpages.charter.net/dkessler/files/Collision%20Frequ...
- strgcmc 8y agoThis is actually a really great analogy for not the reason you're thinking, because of the fairly common incidence of car accidents. Sure, the surface of the earth is not crowded due to the volume of cars. But that doesn't mean that car traffic is trivially easy to solve or travel is automagically safe. Space flight safety should mirror (or be better than) air travel safety (in accidents per mile terms); if space flight becomes more like cars, then space flight is probably screwed.