Imagine two vehicles racing toward each other at a closing speed of just under 15 kilometres a second. Not an hour, not a minute - a second. Now imagine those vehicles passing each other by a distance of 30 metres, perhaps 15 metres, possibly less. One vehicle weighs 954 kilograms, the other 85 kilograms.
Now imagine the razor-sharp calculations are just a smidge out and they smash into each other at just under 53,000 kms. an hour.
The vehicles are dead satellites and their rendezvous is set for 6:39 p.m. ET some 900 kilometres over Pittsburgh.
It's the stuff of nightmares. Here's a video that will give you an idea of how vulnerable our civilization is to this sort of catastrophe.
It has a name, the 'Kessler Effect' or the Kessler Cascade.
It's not something that could go wrong but something that, unless we do something very expensive and inconvenient about it, will go wrong as a mathematical certainty. NASA scientist Don Kessler got to thinking about all the junk in low-Earth orbit zinging around at 15,000 miles an hour. He wondered what happens when, eventually, that junk begins to impact other orbiting stuff like satellites. Even a small piece of junk is all it takes for a big satellite to explode into thousands of new bits of orbiting shrapnel just waiting to turn other spacecraft into ever more clouds of orbiting shrapnel. Eventually there'll be nothing left functioning in space and that orbital band will become unusable for, well, generations.
You know that cellphone? Nah, ain't going to work. Neither will your computer or your cable TV. Ditto for your and everyone else's GPS and that includes the military and every airline. Your ATM? Forget about it. And the transportation and distribution networks that keep food on your local store shelves, they'll go down too. If we're lucky our authorities will be able to keep some of our utilities functioning at some level, at least for a while.
Our governments, or some of them, are really beginning to take this seriously now but that mainly takes the form of panic, not action. There is futuristic talk about deploying orbital janitors that will track down and capture space debris and fire it back to earth for it to burn up on re-entry. Talk, however, is cheap. Action is expensive and, for the moment, elusive.
Smart acrobats have figured out they can still dazzle the crowd and use safety nets - just in case. In fact, I enjoy the performance better knowing the guy leaping from one swing to another has a good chance of not killing himself if something goes wrong. The thing is, we're not as smart as those acrobats. We're doing all the high wire stuff today without nets. It's just that we've been trained never to look down.
3 comments:
Yup. Here we all are, wondering what the hell we can do about getting the population even mildly interested in ecological action beyond banning plastic shopping bags at Sobeys, or wondering when Trump will push the red button just because he feels extra pissed off one day at something or other.
Yet the world as we know it may just croak when two satellites collide. The things you don't normally think about may well be what gets you. Everyone runs around like chickens with their heads cut off on novel coronavirus, with our oh-so-well informed population dunning Chinese-Canadians living in the apartment next to them in Markham. Yeah, weird viruses are an innate Chinese thing, apparently. Brainpower beyond tribal nonsense beliefs cannot be ascribed to the average Canuck desperately searching for facemasks at Shoppers Drug Mart, and yet who cannot even bother to get a flu shot, because well, injections cause autism, y'know.
It's not as if the topic of space collisions hasn't been raised several times before, heads-a-noddin' everywhere in agreement, with everyone a few days afterwards sitting on their hands and forgetting about it. Trump wants his Space Force. Now. He probably hasn't a clue on this matter any more than he has a clue on any other.
You have technological poobahs like Musk at Tesla/SpaceX wanting to put up thousands of light-coloured satellites that will reflect light and ruin astronomical observations on Earth. Gotta have internet for the masses you see. Astronomers have warned us that seeing the Milky Way afterwards will not be something humans will observe from the ground ever afterwards. "Not my problem," says Musk, leader of a tribal group who worship his every pronouncement and drive his EVs, proving their environmental chops. And Musk is not really anxious to put some effort into cleaning up the tens of thousands of bits of space debris already clogging up our upper atmosphere -- not sexy enough.
The parallel we have in Canuckland is kenney being completely uninterested in remediating the 94,000 old oil and gas wells in Alberta - his program for everlasting fame is to open the Teck bitumen pit to double down on a bit of plant-healthy CO2, while garroting naysayers from his War Room. Global warming may extend tomato growing territory to Northern Alberta if he's lucky, after all. Is there a real difference between the giant egos of Musk and kenney, self-aggrandizers of the nth degree? They both ignore reality and merely push their own agendas.
It may all end not with a bang, but a whimper.
BM
You touch on something I've written about before: how little we know of our own resilience to disruptive events. We've developed such incredible levels of prosperity but it's taken a very complex and interdependent society to pull it off. There was a time when many people knew how to fix their cars or plant a garden, to hunt or fish. Today we've become increasingly expert and a decreasing range of activities, a situation in which our high productivity leaves us dependent on others for many critical needs. When we could no longer do this with terrestrial, analog systems, we went digital and then into low-Earth orbit networks. Think of it as flying a paper airplane without a parachute. It's all splendid until something goes wrong. But, as I mentioned above, we've mastered the art of never looking down.
It was my initial reaction to welcome a satellite free world as a return to a more simplistic time.
That will not happen.
Digital technology can be transmitted by low orbit vessels such as balloons.
If digital Armageddon does occur I will have to dust off my rotary phone.
I say that with the surety that most of Mounds fans can remember such artifacts!
TB
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