Kessler Syndrome

 

In this day of worrying about how to pay your bills without an income, school your kids, increase your credit card debt to eat from GrubHub and watch Netflix, call your mother in the nursing home where you cannot travel to as your car’s tires deflate from sitting still in the driveway, decide whether to get a test or a shot of virus, get mad at your team losing in an empty coliseum without a beer because there is a shortage of aluminum, walking your dog with a diaper on your face and not being able to trim your toe nails because you can’t see your feet; here is something else to think about.

Since the first sputnik was sent into the vastness of space in 1957, our little blue marble has been shooting rockets out carrying the latest technological stuff to fly around the globe telling us where the enemy is, what is happening to the weather, how to get from point A to point B and the Internet. This array of satellites running your phone, computer, television and watch are growing by the minute and the ones that are obsolete or stopped working just floating around out there at 15,000mph.

 The inflatable idea of how big the universe is matches our understanding of eternity. If the missiles were just sent out of the atmosphere and beyond our gravity pull, they would just go on forever until they run into a planet or star or get sucked into a black hole.

These useful satellites must be close enough to communicate with the planet so they just rotate around above the clouds. When they stop working they are just left out there.

A note in a bottle thrown into the ocean will bob up and down in the waves and drift out of sight by the currents, but it is still out there. Finding a spot in this space carousal is becoming more difficult, technology continues to improve needing newer upgrades to squeeze in this global highway.

The Kessler syndrome (also called the Kessler effect, collision cascading or ablation cascade), proposed by NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler in 1978, is a theoretical scenario in which the density of objects in low Earth orbit (LEO) due to space pollution is high enough that collisions between objects could cause a cascade in which each collision generates space debris that increases the likelihood of further collisions. One implication is that the distribution of debris in orbit could render space activities and the use of satellites in specific orbital ranges difficult for many generations.

As all this space junk start smashing into each other the debris will continue to spread out bumping into others or getting pulled out of orbit by gravity and crashing back on earth.

The bubble of metal projectiles will keep us grounded. If you wondered if we could leave our decaying home planet and move out into space somewhere, not even Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers could get through.

So as you worry about forest fires, hurricanes, floods, drought, hunger, evictions, failing infrastructure, health care, climate change, wars, environment pollution, animal extinction, civil disturbance, political mayhem and what to do now the Kardashians are gone, here is something else to keep you awake at night.

Sweet dreams.