I don't follow how a linear process would lead to an exponential result, can you please explain?
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[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110515132446/http://webpages.c...
So effectively, roughly paraphrasing GP's comment is that if the launch rate remains constant at its current historical high level (and it could easily go up further) and this leads to more objects in space (which is a safe assumption) then the moment of the triggering of the Kessler syndrome gets moved forward in time, would that be correct?
If you have a number of events, like meetings, moving one forward is putting it first, or earlier. But if you have a single event, with no notional queue, wouldn't moving it to an earlier point in time be "moved backward in time"? :)
I’m pretty easy to convince that the risk is sigmoid and the early part looks exponential. But this justification does not lead there.
Sorry, wrong: very much sub exponentially in fact quadratic Sum_i^n i = n(n+1)/2
Then you might get space hooks, orbital cannons, asteroid/moon mining etc. It's kind of akin to Moore's "law" which really is an observation of continual investment, research, and production to enable larger and larger economic uses.
Space has a near-infinite (relative to our experience) of "potential use cases": there's a lot of usable matter out there, boatloads of always-on solar energy without pesky clouds, atmospheres, or night-time, and of course a LOT of room, and no gravity.
So if you get economic profit from launching things into space, and the cost of the launching gradually goes down, even linearly, the amount of use will be a multiple of the linear cost improvement.
I guess Moore's law was what it was because what was being optimized was two-dimensional shrinking.
Space in orbit is a bit of two dimensional (orbital planes) with stacking, but then in deep space it will be purely three dimensional expansion. That's pretty exponential as a driving force.
You should be a little more concerned about the pollution on Earth.
I'm glad we built cities over pristine nature. Hope we can do the same in space.
There is a limit to how much we can pollute space.
I personally think we're going to lose space for at least a 1000 years, along with every other disaster this century. It will be for some asinine, short sited reason, i.e., power or money.
Our food supply is still mostly human powered. Tractors will get better.
We'll have to do something other than surveil people and shit-post on the internet to fill our time. Oh well.
Basic electrical knowledge is way too widespread for anything less than total apocalypse to push us more than 50-100 years back in tech-level.
Schematics and parts to assemble simple TTL computers are sufficiently widespread that computing would definitely continue. Small-scale electrical infrastructure is very simple and easy to set up, especially with the large number of high-quality manual tools available almost everywhere.
BTW, the best argument for longevity research that I've come across to date is that if people lived for a thousand years suddenly there would be a lot of support for stabilization of our eco-systems.
For something to stay up 1000 years, even a small object like a lost nut, it must orbit at least 900 km away from the Earth.
And Kessler syndrome, even if fully developed, will likely not prevent you from flying to other celestial bodies. Compared to an orbit, you only spend a very short time in the region cluttered by debris when leaving the Earth entirely.
Agreed about the needle-in-haystacks part, though.
Not really. The universe is about 93 billion light-years in size and won't ever be traversable in a finite amount of time.
Your comment seems to indicate that you think of "space" as earth orbit. Starship is specifically about going beyond orbit.
It's time to move beyond scarcity thinking.
We are in a desperate race to expand to space vs destroy ourselves before we get there. If you think that race has been won while three nations have the power to end the human race at the press of a nuclear launch button, you're naive.
The Great Filter has a gun pointed squarely at our head and is very slowly pulling the trigger.
Space fantasies aren't part of avoiding scarcity thinking. Space fantasies are a distraction to getting everyone's needs met.
https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/energy-slaves/
Our current "post scarcity" world is built on shaky grounds. But it doesn't have to collapse.
Even if we let Kessler syndrome run unchecked to the point of no return where it destroys a large portion of satellites, we will either start serious clean-up of certain orbits to allow military observation and communication satellites to go up again, or we will develop better collision avoidance or self-defence systems.
We've written a check we aren't able to cash. The solution isn't to keep writing checks.
There is no one with money who is interested or capable of solving our problems.
Put together, I space pollution will basically be a rounding error in the grand scheme of things, at least for a very, very long time. And beyond that, space is empty, so we aren’t even destroying anything to do stuff
It would be great if we could move our most polluting activities (factories, refineries) to the Moon or Mars.
Design sketch from 1978, with numbers: https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/1976.skyhook/pap...
> getting into the destination body's orbit
I said round-trip energy costs. The delta-v for arriving cargo to enter orbit equals the delta-v for departing cargo. Over a full cycle of sending equal payloads both ways, the net change of energy and momentum is zero. I linked to an analysis of one way to harness this. When the skyhook in the linked example boosts a payload from Venus-Earth Hohmann to Earth-Mars Hohmann, the skyhook's orbit gets perturbed; but it gets the opposite perturbation on the boost on the opposite traffic.
(This is not the only non-rocket approach to free-space transport with potentially low marginal cost.)
Niche applications like low-temperature ZBLAN manufacturing might make more sense.
The delta-v required to move objects between planets is measured in thousands of m/s (e.g. just getting to low earth orbit requires about 10000 m/s), and the fuel required goes up exponentially with delta-v.
As Elon Musk put it: "If you had crack-cocaine on Mars, in prepackaged pallets, it still wouldn't make sense to transport it back here."