This is a current 'doomsday' scenario in play that would depress me infinitely.
Can you imagine having trapped ourselves for centuries beneath a vortex of debris?
what if this is the reason there are not more star-faring species? they are all trapped in Kessler Clouds. hilarious.
The lamest universe ever. Although the cloud might let up after a millennia or so, it would be so very ridiculous if that was enough to keep every 'intelligent' species trapped until they wiped themselves out. A black fly in the cosmic chardonnay, if you will.
A black fly in the cosmic Chardonnay
I think you've tapped in to your inner Alanis Moriset here.
This is so very interesting. I don't understand why it isn't space agencies' prerogative to clean some of that stuff up. I don't understand why those satellites were not programmed to re-enter Earth after their mission has expired.
It's the 21st century equivalent of "Nah man, we'll just take this water out of the lake, put our excrement in it, then dump it back into the lake and everything will be fine!" In about a century, I expect someone will realize this is a problem (maybe we'll realize a use for the graveyard orbits or something along those lines) and then there will be a mad dash of policy-making to try to preserve what orbits we have left and clean up all the other junk that's floating around.
I doubt it. The problem with the Kessler cloud is that these objects are moving in various directions at speeds several times faster than a bullet. It's one thing to get a craft to line up with one specific piece of debri, but when it's a random vortex of fast-moving shrapnel, anything you put up there will be destroyed, and it's fragments will contribute to the cloud.
What if we just stuck a huge piece of metal and carbon fiber up there and just sort of let it hit?Or how about raw explosions, no shrapnel, just boom? When I'm talking sheet of metal and carbon fiber and other similarly durable materials, I'm talking possibly several layers of it, and very thick. It gets hit, gets filled with debris, and then gets dissembled. Or not, it could just become a giant floating net to catch various small objects. Also, scientists. C'mon. Shields. Let's get on this guys. You have a reason, we have a need. Star Trek me up baby.
I would think that massive slabs of sticky foam could do a good job of absorbing high speed debris without also releasing particulate.