Our planet has a steadily growing shell of orbital debris. This space junk is most concentrated in low earth orbit band. Currently there are somewhere over 1,100 active Gov't and private satellites in orbit, as well as over 2000 that have ceased functioning. That's just the satellites, as it is estimated that there are over 600,000 pieces of bullshit between 1 and 10 CM just waiting to blow a bunch of holes in any given mission. Now, if a large enough object were to collide in LEO, or some kind of explosion, these debris objects will begin colliding, creating shrapnel, and impacting MORE objects in a runaway feedback reaction. This gives us a number of problems, the first being that it totally kills any launch viability for the foreseeable future as well as destroying all the satellites we already have in orbit. The other major problem is that as these thousands upon thousands of objects get kicked around much like atoms in a nuclear chain reaction, a good number of them will de-orbit and enter earth atmosphere causing heating due to air friction. That is bad for obvious reasons. So /sagan/ how do we take preventative actions against this? Do we even need to worry? what would a post-cascade earth be like?
