• Flying SquidOP
    link
    12 hours ago

    That’s quite the heel-turn from “I could easily find a dozen links from people claiming the earth is flat,” but congratulations on taking a tiny bit of effort and reading the first paragraph of one of the many links I posted when I quoted it to you.

    I’m sure looking at the academic paper I gave you wouldn’t even be worth the time of someone with your expert knowledge.

    Weird, though, that you say you could “easily find a dozen links from people claiming the earth is flat” and yet have provided no links to support your actual claim.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      127 minutes ago

      What heel-turn? I stated it isn’t possible for these to cause Kessler Syndrome and haven’t departed from that.

      I did read your links when you initially replied, and they don’t claim that they’ll cause Kessler Syndrome. Some of them dance around the topic with scary sounding premises but none actually state it because it’s impossible for something orbiting flying that low to be trapped in orbit for long just like an airplane with engines that die can’t maintain altitude and continue flying for long. You don’t need to be an expert in aeronautics or spaceflight to understand this because it’s basic physics.

      Yes I focused on that statement that you quoted because that’s what you quoted in your reply as proof it’s possible even though all it said was that more evasive maneuvers are happening as more of these satellites are put into orbit just like more cars will need to dodge debris in the road during rush hour than during the middle of the night when nobody is on the road.

      I didn’t post a list of flat earther links because neither one of us is arguing that the earth is flat. This statement was hyperbole to point out the flawed reasoning in thinking that your position is correct simply because you can find someone else stating the same thing (something those links don’t actually even do if the topic is Kessler Syndrome). Yeah, they can crash into something and cause debris, but they can’t be trapped up there permanently and prevent us from reaching space again because their orbit is so low.

      Will the space debris problem take care of itself?

      In low Earth orbit (below 600 km or 370 miles), the little atmosphere that is there will, over weeks, months, and years, drag the space debris low enough to reenter. Between 600 km and 1000 km (620 mi) it may take tens to hundreds of years for the debris to reenter.

      Starlink orbits at 342 miles so assuming the entire constellation exploded into debris, they’d only be an issue for as little as a few weeks and as much as a couple of years before burning up and clearing themselves out. Kessler Syndrome requires that something be in high earth or geostationary orbit to trap us on the planet permanently.

      https://aerospace.org/article/space-debris-101

      • Flying SquidOP
        link
        019 minutes ago

        No one said anything about permanently. That’s been your whole issue here? Because that’s not how gravity works anyway. The thing you yourself quoted says it could take years for it to reenter. So that’s years of too much debris in LEO to launch anything safely.

        I have no idea where you got the notion that Kessler syndrome means something like nothing can ever be launched again until the year 5 billion when the sun engulfs the Earth.