That’s a great point, and has almost nothing to do with Kessler Syndrome. But what can I say? I live near a city where the leaders of a few nations decided it would be fun to test the effects of fallout by releasing radioactive dust over it. Aluminum oxide is pretty benign, comparatively.
Certainly, the consequences of our actions need to be considered, but let’s stick to the legitimate ones, such as what you listed, and not the highly improbable ones such as Kessler Syndrome.
Debris from a collision can be flung in all directions, including higher orbits.
Possible, but not at all likely. The joy of orbits are they’re pretty predictable because after the energy is applied the object just keeps following a path. To get a higher circular orbit would require deceleration at the right point to stabilize it. If this doesn’t happen, and it doesn’t in a collision, you will have a new orbit that will more or less pass through the altitude of the impact. So while it may have a higher apogee, it will have a lower perigee, which means it will suffer more drag due to more atmosphere. So the vast majority of debris from the collision of a LEO satellite collision will naturally deorbit, possibly faster than if the satellite hadn’t just become inert in its orbit.
The low orbits that need to be constantly maintained or they naturally deorbit are the exact opposite of Kessler Syndrome. If every Starlink satellite was to disintegrate right now, the majority of the debris would be gone in 5 years.
There was a story about a researcher using evolving algorithms to build more efficient systems on FPGAs. One of the weird shortcuts was some system that normally used a clock circuit, but none was available, and it made a dead-end circuit the would give a electric pulse when used, giving it a makeshift clock circuit. The big problem was that better efficiency often used quirks of the specific board, and his next step was to start testing the results on multiple FPGAs and using the overall fitness to get past that quirk/shortcut.
Pretty sure this was before 2010. Found a possible link from 2001.
So, “nuclear test und an uninhibited island” next?
Un inhabited?
Edit: apparently you can’t have partial words italicized.
Summarize that sentence into a thumbs up or thumbs down emoji.
I almost always called family from the previous generations by title and first name, or just title. So, Grandpa, Aunt Sue, etc. Cousins and siblings got first name only. My kids call their immediate parents mom and dad, and their step-parents mom or my wife’s first name. I rarely associate with my ex or her husband, and they refer to him when talking to me by his first name. If they were close enough to him to refer to him as dad, I’d be happy for them to have that good a relationship.
A single point of data rarely answers the question unless you’re looking for absolutes. “Will zipping 10 files individually be smaller than zipping them into a single file?” Sure, easy enough to do it once. Now, what kind of data are we talking about? How big, and how random, is the data in those files? Does it get better with more files, or is the a sweet spot where it’s better, but it’s worse if you use too few files, or too many? I don’t think you could test for those scenarios very quickly, and they all fall under the original question. OTOH, someone who has studied the subject could probably give you an answer easily enough in just a few minutes. Or he could have tried a web search and find the answer, which pretty much comes down to, “It depends which compression system you use.”
That’s precisely why I chose string theory, because it does have value, even if it can’t be tested at this time. Yet, even though little can be done to advance it, shrugging and ignoring it won’t change that state, if you’re a scientist.
As for the pondering of philosophers, there is a good chance that many of their questions will never be answered, and yes, there would be little value to study them, as a scientist. But that qualifier has a dramatic effect on your previous statements.
It sounds like you’re trying to use the wrong tool, though. Science is a great system for learning about the observable universe, but less so for other things. To put it another way, science is great for telling you how, philosophy is great for exploring why.
This is kind of wrong, and is a common conflation with respect to science. First, scientists do talk about things that cant be proven, string theory being just one of them. It’s an idea of the physical world that cant be proven. If we have a way to actually test a hypothesis of string theory, it will get more attention. But if you don’t have people thinking about these things, we won’t have better models for describing the universe, such as relativity. Similarly, science can’t prove a negative. Science will never tell you God doesn’t exist or can’t exist, only that we have no proof that God exists and that we have no model where he could. But our knowledge has been less complete before, and our models have been updated as knowledge is gained.
And much of philosophy has no basis in the physical world, but this doesn’t mean it isn’t worth thinking about.
Pretty much everything you said is incorrect, except for the article age. Valetudo literally wrote software that does this on multiple models locally, including mapping. The response of the manufacturers whose models were capable of this was to release new versions where this wasn’t an option. As for servers and local control, there are a number of solutions for those with the knowledge and hardware to set it up, and the only thing stopping robovac companies from supporting this is (less) money.
We could still live in caves, but most of us have chosen not to. I’m personally of the opinion that every advancement that gives you more time to do things that are important to you are worth it. This doesn’t mean inviting every piece of spyware some company tries to thrust upon me is acceptable, either.
The Pebble Time 2 has a heart rate monitor. I can’t say if the rest of your statement is correct or not.
That’s not really how orbits work. Unless there is a stabilizing burn or very unusual conditions the debris will have an eccentric orbit, going both lower and higher than the impact point. And passing below the orbits of the starlink satellites will expose them to even more atmosphere than they will be at the starlink orbit, so their orbits will decay faster than their apogee would suggest. Sure, some will experience the right conditions to put them in an orbit such that the perigee is at the altitude of the starlink orbits or even higher, but the vast majority will not.
This does not preclude carelessness or malice causing impacts, the launch in question being the former and China’s satellite destruction previously being the latter. Do you think Starlink isn’t releasing their orbital paths to other launch organizations? And that net is generally very predictable. Any deviation from the existing orbit is done at the expense of the lifespan of the satellite and while there are a lot of those satellites, there’s far more empty space between them. The kind of planning that rocket launches normally get is more than enough to hit those windows, along with the other windows rocket launches normally have to hit.