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.
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.
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.
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.