How visible is Earth's space junk pollution?

Chongqing said:
So, if not pour it down the drain, what are you supposed to do with your cooking oil?

Are you supposed to wait for it to cool, and then pour it in a patch of dirt?
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Either get a cooking oil solidifier and dispose of it in the trash or put your waste oil into a deli container, freeze it and then dispose of it on garbage night in the trash.

how are you suppose to throw away cooking oil.png
 
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Londo said:
Same reason that travelling faster than light - even if possible - would be very much impossible... even if space is mostly a void, all it would take it something with the mass of a fleck of paint to create enough energy on impact to create a nuclear level explosion of any object going that fast.

Star Trek deflector shields hopefully become a thing.
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IIRC most ideas for FTL travel don't involve traveling through normal space, so particulate matter wouldn't be an issue.

In Star Trek style FTL (as envisioned by the Alcubierre Drive), the ship stays within a small bubble of normal spacetime. It's not moving at all by any normal metric. However, the bubble itself is moving at incredible speed. This gets around relativity because you're not actually going faster than the speed of light in normal space. You're just bending normal space around you and riding through that bubble. A more realistic comparison would be a supercavitating torpedo. Due to the bubble of air around it, it's able to move through the water much faster than if it had to push through all that water on its own.

The caveat to the Alcubierre Drive (although not proven, and they don't know how to get around it if it IS a thing) is that you would generate large amounts of gamma radiation on the leading edge of that bubble. And when you drop back into normal space, all that radiation would get blasted forward, which would cause a very, very bad day for any planet in front of you.

So tl;dr - you wouldn't have to worry about impacts, just turning your destination into an irradiated wasteland.
 
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Lithuophile said:
I'm pretty sure the damage to humanity and the planet as a whole would be far greater in trying to occupy a country as big as China, especially since the rest of the world would get involved, either on China's side or against them. If it escalates into a world war, who tf know what will happen?
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I'm not pro war, I just mean compared to other justification for war, this would be better than pride parades in Kiev or some personal grudge against Saddam Hussein.

No satellites in a few decades would also make it much easier for China to wage war against the rest of the world. That's all I'm saying.

Anyone saying, "let's go to war," is an idiot.
 
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The Connected Nose said:
IIRC most ideas for FTL travel don't involve traveling through normal space, so particulate matter wouldn't be an issue.

In Star Trek style FTL (as envisioned by the Alcubierre Drive), the ship stays within a small bubble of normal spacetime. It's not moving at all by any normal metric. However, the bubble itself is moving at incredible speed. This gets around relativity because you're not actually going faster than the speed of light in normal space. You're just bending normal space around you and riding through that bubble. A more realistic comparison would be a supercavitating torpedo. Due to the bubble of air around it, it's able to move through the water much faster than if it had to push through all that water on its own.

The caveat to the Alcubierre Drive (although not proven, and they don't know how to get around it if it IS a thing) is that you would generate large amounts of gamma radiation on the leading edge of that bubble. And when you drop back into normal space, all that radiation would get blasted forward, which would cause a very, very bad day for any planet in front of you.

So tl;dr - you wouldn't have to worry about impacts, just turning your destination into an irradiated wasteland.
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I personally hope we eventually invent the Battlestar Galactica FTL method. Noise included.

To make intersolar travel possible we'd need to get waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay above the speed of light because even at that speed the sheer scale of not only the Milkyway but just our quadrant of it would take countless generations to reach any planet that could likely support us.

The power requirements to achieve it at any scale would likely ntot only soak up the resources of Sol but probably require much more, and then you'd also need to transport that method of power generation along with it's cargo, It would also be interesting to know how the mass of such an object and the gravity it would generate would impact said travel.

hypothetical physics is fun.
 
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Dysnomia said:
The tiny pieces you can barely are supposed to be the most dangerous. Just a speck of space junk hitting a spacecraft at the right speed can cause serious damage.

And isn't it just like us to leave trash everywhere. Even in space. But it's inevitable. If you are going to sent people and things up there then you are going to generate space junk.
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even in interstellar space, beyond the suns heliosphere the issue of space debris is present. Atleast when you're orbiting Earth you aren't moving at like 20%c like you would if you're traveling towards another solar system.
 
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Londo said:
The illustrations are used as people struggle really poorly with the visualisation of space.

We've royally fucked ourselves with the space junk situation. It's not the large pieces that are the issues or old, disused tech - they will naturally get pulled down and will burn up on re-entry. The main issue are all the tiny particles and fingernail sized debris. With a lack of resistance and the speeds at which items travel to maintain orbit it doesn't take very much to cause significant damage.

The ISS has already had to do an emergency thrust within the last few years to avoid impact.

Another thing the public don't realize is that satellites follow routes like ships do on Earth to avoid the weak spots in the magnetic field that allow higher levels of radiation to get through.

tl;dr: the public are retarded, space is complex to understand, and they need to make images that emphasize the point.
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Another dangerous thing about the smaller pieces is that they can't be tracked. Even the larger pieces of debris can get lost for days or weeks at a time, and sometimes the eggheads are lucky to get a positive ID on the same piece later on assuming it didn't fragment into even more debris.
 
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I've seen satellites through a telescope and even then they look like tiny, fast moving dots. So I think space junk isn't readily visible from the surface, and may be seen as the occasional dot. It'd range in size from tiny projectiles like bits of paint, to larger objects like defunct satellites. All moving at several kilometers per second.
 
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XYZpdq Jr. said:
You can see the ISS from the surface with the naked eye.
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HUGE LEO objects like that are one thing, if you're talking GEO, you need some serious telescope hardware to get a blurry 100x100 image of those. As another instance of incredibly obvious shit in low earth orbit, starlinks reflect so much you can see them in trains across the sky at night.
 
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The Connected Nose said:
NGL, the noise is what made it for me. Wish they'd done more with how jumping in close proximity to another ship will wreak havoc though.
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When Boomer FTL'd in the stolen Viper as they where retracting the pod's an it ruptured the hull was fucking amazing, also there was one episode where there was a ship that was rebelling / protesting that was about to be boarded by Marines from Raptors and it batted them away - the reasoning was by the Visual Effects people an the Writers was the it was more impactful on the Galactica because she was already damaged extremely so as that was one of the sections that was blown out when Boomer blew up the water tanks, and the Nukes, an various other bits of Battle Damage (this was leading up to the Galactica only having a few jumps left plot line) and the Raptors unless carrying non crew members if they are in a combat situation fly depressurised to reduce risks of fire / explosion etc - thats why they where batted around not destoryed when the other ship did it, They did this in the expanse as well with the battle of the ring station where the Rocinante depressurised it's self an all the crew had to ware space suits for the duration of the battle.
 
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Bro just use some common sense
If YOU can't see that shit from the ground, how do you think anybody's going to see it from space?
No. Imagine having thousands of balls scattered around the globe randomly. Now imagine the globe is like 100x bigger (because the sphere of orbits this stuff is in has a much larger surface area). It is a complete nothingburger.
 
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