Kessler Syndrome: How screwed will YOU be?

[NT2C]

No GPS, no Starlink, telephone and data services crippled, crazy amounts of space debris falling, just how screwed are you?  Your credit cards and bank cards are dead, businesses are now cash only.  Store deliveries are sporadic, For all intents and purposes, Amazon no longer exists.

What's your plan?

[majorhavoc]

In case anyone's a little fuzzy on this not-so-fantastical scenario.

I have about 2 grand as a cash reserve. Hopefully by the time that runs out bartering will have become widely established because I have a number of supplies that by then will be highly desirable.

Hopefully all that will last me to the beginning of New England's short growing season when I can test the viability of the seeds in my seed vault. Because if they don't germinate I'm totally complaining to Amazon.

Oh, wait ... 

[Anianna]

A lot of these things can revert to pre-satelite means of business.  Banks and credit cards still use ground-based internet and can revert to that for most anything they use satellites for.  Heck, we can go back to using the chunkchunk slider gizmo for credit cards if we have to.  How dependent on satellites is Amazon?  I suspect their shipping would be far less efficient and a number of AWS services would suffer, but would they really stop selling online?  

People are going to have to learn to read paper maps again.  Disaster response in remote areas and areas where services have been impacted will be hampered.  One positive effect of Kessler Syndrome will be reduced surveillance on us.  LA is certainly going to be a mess with a bunch of driverless cars suddenly stopping wherever they are.  

I'm curious what makes you think cell service would be disrupted.  As far as I'm aware, only the satellite SOS feature on certain newer cell phones relies on satellites rather than ground-based infrastructure.

If these banks and companies were smart, they would have hardened for this back when the warning was made in no uncertain terms in 2009 even if they hadn't heeded the ongoing warnings since the 1960s. If they weren't that smart, they should still be able to adapt to some extent.  I don't think the satellites blinking out will be the end of it all.

There is already a significant accumulation of space debris to the point that low Earth orbit (LEO) is considered unstable and we lose satellites every year to it.  Orbital decay to a significant extent isn't likely to happen any more than we already experience within our lifetimes for most of the debris due to insignificant atmospheric drag at the typical elevation.  Most of it will remain cluttered in LEO or be knocked a little further into space following a path of least resistance (our atmosphere causes resistance and objects can skip off of it a lot like skipping rocks across water depending on their trajectory).  While forces like lunar perturbation and solar wind combined with slight atmospheric drag can eventually force debris into lower altitudes, we're looking at closer to 1,000 years than any time soon.  Hopefully, if people are still around by then, they will have figured out how to mitigate that damage.  

We should be as ready as we can for banks and the economy to fail.  I just don't think Kessler Syndrome, which is inevitable at this point, will be what does it.  It will, however, eliminate any chance to leave the planet, so maybe we should stop fucking up the planet we live on.

[Anianna]

Hopefully all that will last me to the beginning of New England's short growing season when I can test the viability of the seeds in my seed vault. Because if they don't germinate I'm totally complaining to Amazon.

Oh, wait ... 

LOL

You should look at vendors selling heirloom seeds and seeds native to your area for best results.  Also, get lots of cheap seeds to use for microgreens.  You can grow microgreens without any special equipment.  They don't even need light or nutrients, just the warmth to encourage the seed to sprout.  The sprout has everything else it needs to get that far within the seed in much the same way eggs have what is needed to bring a critter into the world.  If you eat it before it grows further, you don't need anything else to keep it alive.

[NT2C]

A lot of these things can revert to pre-satelite means of business.  Banks and credit cards still use ground-based internet and can revert to that for most anything they use satellites for.  Heck, we can go back to using the chunkchunk slider gizmo for credit cards if we have to.  How dependent on satellites is Amazon?  I suspect their shipping would be far less efficient and a number of AWS services would suffer, but would they really stop selling online? 

>snip<

I'm curious what makes you think cell service would be disrupted.  As far as I'm aware, only the satellite SOS feature on certain newer cell phones relies on satellites rather than ground-based infrastructure.

If these banks and companies were smart, they would have hardened for this back when the warning was made in no uncertain terms in 2009 even if they hadn't heeded the ongoing warnings since the 1960s. If they weren't that smart, they should still be able to adapt to some extent.  I don't think the satellites blinking out will be the end of it all.

We should be as ready as we can for banks and the economy to fail.  I just don't think Kessler Syndrome, which is inevitable at this point, will be what does it.  It will, however, eliminate any chance to leave the planet, so maybe we should stop fucking up the planet we live on.

Currently, after the demise of the AT&T Longlines system, quite a large portion of "out-of-area" phone calls go via satellite relay, same for the vast majority of today's internet.  Want to connect to your bank's credit card server?  Unless it's local you're SOL.  Same for checking.  We no longer have local check clearing facilities like we used to.  (Good friend's mom worked in one of the 6 in NYC BITD) Of all the industries that were the most willing to jump on the early internet, the finance industry was possibly first after telecomm companies.  Finance, because hundredths of a second can mean thousands of dollars when processing millions of transactions, and telecomm because copper lines are expensive to purchase and maintain.  Hence the whole reason MCI (Microwave Communications Incorporated) came onto being.  These days, everything funnels to ground stations that burst the packets to satellites for speed of light relaying to another ground station.  This also affects cell service, because such service isn't cell tower to cell tower; it's phone to tower, to ground lines (fiber), to local switching station that routes it to whoever it needs to go, with the main hop in the middle going by satellite.  We simply no longer have the ground based infrastructure to sustain anything close to our current traffic levels.

Without satellites, all that is completely and totally borked, and will stay borked for a very long time.

[Anianna]

A lot of these things can revert to pre-satelite means of business.  Banks and credit cards still use ground-based internet and can revert to that for most anything they use satellites for.  Heck, we can go back to using the chunkchunk slider gizmo for credit cards if we have to.  How dependent on satellites is Amazon?  I suspect their shipping would be far less efficient and a number of AWS services would suffer, but would they really stop selling online? 

>snip<

I'm curious what makes you think cell service would be disrupted.  As far as I'm aware, only the satellite SOS feature on certain newer cell phones relies on satellites rather than ground-based infrastructure.

If these banks and companies were smart, they would have hardened for this back when the warning was made in no uncertain terms in 2009 even if they hadn't heeded the ongoing warnings since the 1960s. If they weren't that smart, they should still be able to adapt to some extent.  I don't think the satellites blinking out will be the end of it all.

We should be as ready as we can for banks and the economy to fail.  I just don't think Kessler Syndrome, which is inevitable at this point, will be what does it.  It will, however, eliminate any chance to leave the planet, so maybe we should stop fucking up the planet we live on.

Currently, after the demise of the AT&T Longlines system, quite a large portion of "out-of-area" phone calls go via satellite relay, same for the vast majority of today's internet.  Want to connect to your bank's credit card server?  Unless it's local you're SOL.  Same for checking.  We no longer have local check clearing facilities like we used to.  (Good friend's mom worked in one of the 6 in NYC BITD) Of all the industries that were the most willing to jump on the early internet, the finance industry was possibly first after telecomm companies.  Finance, because hundredths of a second can mean thousands of dollars when processing millions of transactions, and telecomm because copper lines are expensive to purchase and maintain.  Hence the whole reason MCI (Microwave Communications Incorporated) came onto being.  These days, everything funnels to ground stations that burst the packets to satellites for speed of light relaying to another ground station.  This also affects cell service, because such service isn't cell tower to cell tower; it's phone to tower, to ground lines (fiber), to local switching station that routes it to whoever it needs to go, with the main hop in the middle going by satellite.  We simply no longer have the ground based infrastructure to sustain anything close to our current traffic levels.

Without satellites, all that is completely and totally borked, and will stay borked for a very long time.

I guess I didn't realize the extent to which we have become dependent on satellites.  I think I'm as ready as I can be.  We'll see how it goes, I guess.

[Anianna]

In light of recent events, how screwed is air trave when the Kessler event comes to fruition? 

[NT2C]

In light of recent events, how screwed is air trave when the Kessler event comes to fruition?

Very, so far as making reservations, not so screwed on navigation as we still have a pretty robust set of navigational aids for aircraft, not just GPS.  OTOH though, who wants to try flying with tons of space junk raining down?

[Anianna]

In light of recent events, how screwed is air trave when the Kessler event comes to fruition?

Very, so far as making reservations, not so screwed on navigation as we still have a pretty robust set of navigational aids for aircraft, not just GPS.  OTOH though, who wants to try flying with tons of space junk raining down?

The space junk isn't going to be raining down much more than it is now for another thousand years or so.  I gave an explanation of that in my last paragraph of my first comment. Dependency on satellites will be the primary problem faced in our lifetimes. 

[NT2C]

In light of recent events, how screwed is air trave when the Kessler event comes to fruition?

Very, so far as making reservations, not so screwed on navigation as we still have a pretty robust set of navigational aids for aircraft, not just GPS.  OTOH though, who wants to try flying with tons of space junk raining down?

The space junk isn't going to be raining down much more than it is now for another thousand years or so.  I gave an explanation of that in my last paragraph of my first comment. Dependency on satellites will be the primary problem faced in our lifetimes.

I beg to differ.  When the orbital pinball game starts racking up points, fragments will be exploding in every direction.  When one of those directions contains a gravitational well, it's going to get a large portion of the fragments.

[Anianna]

In light of recent events, how screwed is air trave when the Kessler event comes to fruition?

Very, so far as making reservations, not so screwed on navigation as we still have a pretty robust set of navigational aids for aircraft, not just GPS.  OTOH though, who wants to try flying with tons of space junk raining down?

The space junk isn't going to be raining down much more than it is now for another thousand years or so.  I gave an explanation of that in my last paragraph of my first comment. Dependency on satellites will be the primary problem faced in our lifetimes.

I beg to differ.  When the orbital pinball game starts racking up points, fragments will be exploding in every direction.  When one of those directions contains a gravitational well, it's going to get a large portion of the fragments.

It's already happening and has been studied for years. 

https://web.archive.org/web/20221204200209/https://www.spaceacademy.net.au/watch/debris/gsd/gsd.htm