Starlink can cause our extermination
Starlink is, so far, one of Elon Musk’s success stories. Thanks to the 3,300 and counting (target: 42,000) Starlink satellites now in orbit, people in 45 countries (and counting) have access to high speed, low latency Internet. In the next few years those 42,000 small satellites could be joined by almost 400,000 more. Most of those other organizations have declined to announce any plans to mitigate the adverse effects of their equipment. Starlink is working actively to reduce the two worst dangers.
The first danger is the instigation of a Kessler Syndrome. In short, this is a positive feedback loop of a single satellite collision cascading rapidly (like a nuclear fission reaction) to the point where low Earth orbit becomes far too dangerous for transit or habitation. The ISS already has to move a few times a year to avoid artificial debris. Such a cascade could block our access to the Universe for centuries or millennia.
The second danger is more insidious. It is light pollution. Apart from cultural effects, which will be significant, these light tracks may very well spell our doom. Let me explain.
The Vera C. Rubin telescope is to be commissioned next year. It is a Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). This means that it is designed to make regular large-scale scans of the twilight and night sky. One of the primary goals is to identify most of the solar system’s near-Earth asteroids and Kuiper belt objects. Unfortunately, “A study in 2020 by the European Southern Observatory estimated that up to 30% to 50% of the exposures around twilight with the Rubin Observatory would be severely affected by satellite constellations.“ Scientific American has an article about the effects on the Rubin telescope.
Objects approaching which have been accelerated by a close orbit of the sun are particularly dangerous. Not only are we less likely to see them, the gravity assist from the Sun could give them a very high speed. If they impact anywhere on Earth, the destruction could be enormous. The Chelyabinsk Meteor of 2013 was a warning shot. It is estimated to have been about 20 metres in diameter. It came from a tight trip around the Sun. The explosive energy was about 500 kilotons equivalent. The Hiroshima bomb was about 15 kilotons.
So here’s a scenario: a Kuiper Belt Object gets nudged out of a stable orbit by a passing extraterrestrial visitor, such as ʻOumuamua in 2017. This may very well have already happened. This KBO (let’s call it “Ubiytsa”, heads toward the inner solar system and is further nudged by one of the Gas Giant planets. Ubiytsa makes a close orbit of the Sun. The Rubin telescope would have seen it, but the images were oversaturated in the critical area by multiple Internet satellite tracks.
We get lucky. Ubiytsa misses us by a few hundred kilometers, and we never know how close we came to the end of all life as we know it. A few years later Ubiytsa is on the return part of its orbit. Again, the Rubin telescope would have seen it with months to spare - time enough to launch an advanced version of DART. But now there are 400,000 low-orbit satellites, and as a cost saving measure, no-one but Starlink has mitigated their brightness. Fortunately, the Planetary Society has managed to land a small survey telescope on the Moon. It finds Ubiytsa again. A couple of days later Kiribati ceases to exist. The Megatsunami destroys everything several hundred kilometers inland in all Pacific Rim land masses. The water and sea floor ejected into the atmosphere cause flooding worldwide that would make Noah look like a river day-tripper. It gets dark. It stays dark for months. 100 million years later, intelligent evolved birds wonder what really caused the Sixth Mass Extinction.
An old joke about the demise of the Dinosaurs is “The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program.“ Many people have said that, but Larry Niven was probably the first. Won’t it be tragically ironic if humanity becomes extinct because we do have a space program?
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