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Comment by al_borland | Hacker News Reader

We could have the same fear with all these satellites being shot up into space. Couldn't they all start raining down on earth with some poor calculations or coding mistakes in the course-correction software?

I don't know enough about this stuff to know if this is a realistic thing or just the premise of a bad sci-fi movie.

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1 - they burn in atmosphere

2 - each satellite is under observation by a team

3 - how many satellites do you think are there actually? Not that many, unlike the driverless cars we are setting up nowadays

4 - Earth is actually big. Satellite pouring down all at once and you'll have maximum like 100 casualties - worse case scenario if 1). doesn't happen. Cars OTOH are in busy cities. One battery to explode and can easily do 100 casualties

> One battery to explode and can easily do 100 casualties

That’s definitely not true. A 66KWh battery is not a tactical nuke

I think autonomous cars are something that must happen, and the sooner the better, but I am also a bit concerned that they could represent the ultimate weapon if a malicious actor gained control over them.

One battery fire isn't a problem, but if every 2nd car in a city or country crashes into something in a way that starts a fire, that becomes a very big problem extremely quickly.

Watch on youtube any video that shows puncturing a cellphone battery what happens. Then scale that up and imagine a scenario where one idiot on drugs drives one in supermarket or mall entrance and the car's battery gets punctured. After that comeback and tell me you still think 100 casualties are hard to happen from only one EV car.

How many? I figured thousands. When I looked it up, there are several thousand. I saw numbers between 4k and 8k. However, the rate of launches seems to be increasing and is over 1k per year now. Musk says he is looking for have 45k up there just for Starlink, and they won't be the only company looking to do stuff like that. So it doesn't seem unreasonable that the number would be in the hundreds of thousands in the not too distant future.

I had heard about the rate at which Starlink was launching stuff a while back which is likely what put that idea in my head.

Let's do worse, let's say 100k satellites in total. And let's say in 5 years will be a million in total. Now compare that with only how many Tesla cars are so far in the world, not to mention all other car manufacturers who wanna do the same.

Satellites would, I assume, burn up on re-enter if they happened to de-orbit. I'm more worried about them banging into one another and surrounding the Earth in an impenetrable debris field that makes future space exploration/travel nearly impossible - IMO that would be a death sentence for all of us.

Maybe Team Seas can pivot to space once they take care of the oceans.

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