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When I read "avoid a catastrophic space collision", I thought about an asteroid hitting the earth and endangering life itself. Compared to that, a "catastrophic
by rob74 5y ago
When I read "avoid a catastrophic space collision", I thought about an asteroid hitting the earth and endangering life itself. Compared to that, a "catastrophic collision that knocks out one or more satellites key to their safety, economic well-being or both" sounds rather like an inconvenience. Of course, it could be "catastrophic" too, but there is catastrophe, and then there is catastrophe...
- zz865 5y agoAnd add to that "The world must cooperate..." you know it'll never happen.
- YinglingLight 5y agoThere is so much military hardware up there, military hardware disguised as civilian, satellites that were launched successfully but publicly described as a failure/"useless orbit". The article is essentially asking that all countries need to share the location of their nuclear subs because the Ocean is getting crowded.
- zabatuvajdka 5y agoTaking a step further, any nation could deliberately send a weaponized fleet to destroy satellites and then follow up with a ground strike.
- Qem 5y agoKessler syndrome itself could probably be weaponized as the cheapest superweapon ever. Say you rule over a small country, under risk of invasion by a much more powerful country, that relies heavily on GPS guided missiles, aircraft and ammunition. Probably it would not be very expensive to pick a couple fat satellites at the right orbital plane, blow them with small missiles able to reach orbital altitude, and let the resulting debris scattershot start a chain reaction to take down every GPS satellite in existence, rendering low to medium Earth orbit useless for centuries as a byproduct. Those smart ammunitions would be crippled overnight, forcing the more powerful country to risk old style boots-in-the-ground invasion, with much degraded technical support.
- lutorm 5y agoAntisat weapons aren't exactly simple, either, though. It's only been successfully done a few times. Intercepting something at orbital velocity isn't trivial (unless you have the capability to actually launch something into a similar orbit and effect a gradual orbital rendezvous.)
- Qem 5y agoI checked, my reasoning doesn't really apply to global positioning satellites, as they have orbits far outside the LEO, about 20000 km. There's not enough mass there yet to ensure a Kessler cascade. They would have to be targeted individually, a far more difficult task.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y agoIf only there was some sort of United Nation organization that wasn’t constantly undermined and turned into theater…
- the-dude 5y agoThat doesn't sell.
- ceilingcorner 5y agoAdjective inflation. Yet another consequence of the advertising business model.
- dontreact 5y agoLet’s say this business model were banned or didn’t exist. Getting people to choose to read your articles instead of the billions of other things they could be doing with their time on the internet would still be critical if you want to get them to subscribe. I think it’s less to do with the business model of advertising but rather I think both that business model and the tendency towards inflating adjectives are both caused by there simply being too much information, entertainment etc. for us to make a reasonable decision of what to pay attention to. We’ve exceeded our own human capacities to process and choose between different streams of information.
- ceilingcorner 5y agoThat might be true, but I think if a business doesn’t rely on views/advertising to fund itself, it has more room for creating a quality brand and attracting subscribers that way. As opposed to writing clickbait headlines. This is essentially what the Financial Times does.
- dalbasal 5y agoAgreed. Social media's the prime example. Take Youtube's monetization. Creators are plugged into a payment per view world. That's definitely an aggravating factor, but the competition for attention is there in a similar form with or without the ad model.
- mistermann 5y agoI think another cause that we do not notice or just take for granted is the way our language itself is designed, it almost seems deliberately designed to support imprecision, ambiguity, confusion, etc. without it being obvious the speaker had that intent.
- dalbasal 5y ago"the advertising business model" or the modern world more broadly? One way or another, there's a lot of short attention span razzle dazzle these days. Maybe adjective inflation is just positively correlated with the volume of media or even of people trying to talk to each other. It's hard competing with impending asteroid collision.
- SunlightEdge 5y agoThat's how I read it too!
- everyone 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
- shreddit 5y ago“The world” is also a bit of a stretch if you mean a handful of countries
- FiberBundle 5y agoAs far as I understand this actually would be a catastrophe. One collision creates a lot of debris, which then again increases the probability of further collisions and so on. You have an exponentially increasing probability of further collisions once you have one. In the worst case this could make rocket launches and satellites in orbit impossible.
- thih9 5y agoI think what GP meant is that this kind of catastrophe (i.e. worst case not being able to make rocket launches or use the orbit) is still better than an asteroid crashing into the earth and perhaps causing an extinction event.
- nautilius 5y agoSure, anything is less catastrophic than an extinction event. Where's your threshold? Tsunami in Indonesia? Tsunami in Fukushima? Hurricane Katrina? Do those count as catastrophes? The problem isn't that we're no longer able to launch new rockets - it's that anything in space comes to a standstill when it gets destroyed. How about GPS is suddenly no longer usable, with planes in flight and ships somewhere on the ocean? Weather satellites allow no more observation, with no more forewarning for hurricanes, and no reliable planning of routes by either plane or ship. What will be the impact of both on modern agriculture? No more satellite based communication, etc.
- mschuster91 5y agoWe will find fallbacks. Humanity as a species is surprisingly resilient. > How about GPS is suddenly no longer usable, with planes in flight and ships somewhere on the ocean? Anything over land can be replaced by antennas sending out a signal from a known location, and receivers can triangulate their position from that. In-flight planes can use landmark plus compass based navigation, as well as (already existing) ground based navigation beacons, and pilots are trained on how to deal with all instruments gone dark scenarios. Ships can sail along land and use sextant navigation on the open seas (actually, the US Navy re-introduced training sailors in sextant use in 2016, to account for a no-electronics scenario!). > Weather satellites allow no more observation, with no more forewarning for hurricanes, and no reliable planning of routes by either plane or ship. The worst loss will be for everything over the open sea, but land based weather documentation will still be possible. > What will be the impact of both on modern agriculture? Not too much, technically we can gather everything agriculture needs from the ground, it's just way more effective and cheaper to observe from space. > No more satellite based communication, etc. That would not be a big loss, there exist (long forgotten outside of amateur radio) technologies to deal with that.
- bluGill 5y agoWe can't grow enough food to support our population without GPS, so either this leads to mass starvation or we go back to 98% of the population becoming subsistence farmers. I'd guess the former - not enough people will be willing to work that hard until it is too late - we are out of food in the middle of winter and thus won't get more for a few months. (it would be possible to force some people to starve in early winter thus saving enough food for the rest)
- davidhyde 5y agoMaybe you’re right. As the general population uses less and less of their creative brains at some point they will be incapable of coming up with an alternative to gps (today someone would most likely have the cognitive capability to erect positioning beacons on their farm).
- bluGill 5y agoIt isn't just making an alternative, it is rolling it out as well.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kwhitefoot 5y ago> We can't grow enough food to support our population without GPS Can you justify this? Edit: I mean can you provide an authoritative source or a plausible argument for believing this?
- bluGill 5y agoGPS allows significantly more crop to be grown on the same land. By giving plants the ideal spacing they harvest the amount of light they need without shading each other or letting light fall unused on the ground (or on weeds that in turn shade the plants). GPS also starts/stops each row of your planter as you cross already planted areas of the field, thus saving a lot of seed and in turn leaving more land free to grow crop instead of seed. GPS also always fertilizer to be placed where needed thus not over fertilizing some areas while under fertilizing others.
- hourislate 5y agoAccording too this article it seems it could very well create some serious issues. https://www.space.com/space-junk-collision-chinese-satellite-yunhai-1-02 https://www.space.com/space-junk-collision-chinese-satellite...