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For some related ideas... Let us imagine that there are 100 000 Starlink-sized satellites on the orbit. At a given time, approximately 29 000 of them are over

• inhumantsar 2y ago
  that's being generous too, since the spherical area those satellites cover is considerably larger than it is at ground level. Douglas Adams nailed it. "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." Very few people, even us nerds who are aware of the scale, and actually hold that scale in their minds properly. And that's just low earth orbit. Geosynchronous, the Lagrange points, an Astronomical Unit, a Light Minute, a Light Year. It's one thing to understand what these things mean, but it's entirely another to put them into a human-scale context. It's like the difference between knowing that there are 20 million people in the New York area and trying to name each one of them individually.