On: Planned satellite megaconstellations could generate runaway space debris

August 8, 2026

The news today is that we are, apparently, on the verge of filling the space around our planet with so much of our own discarded junk that it will eventually become a sort of impassable shell, a cage of our own making. They call it the “Kessler syndrome,” which sounds like a rather unpleasant medical condition one might contract from reading too many government white papers. The models suggest the planned megaconstellations of satellites - thousands of them, like a cloud of very expensive, very stupid gnats - will inevitably collide, creating more debris, which will cause more collisions, and so on, until the whole affair becomes a runaway cascade of shrapnel whipping around the planet at several kilometres per second.

The question everyone is asking, of course, is how we stop this from happening. But I can’t help feeling this is the wrong question, or at least a secondary one. The primary question is why we are so determined to clutter up the one clear view we have of everything else. We are a species that, having barely learned to throw a rock into the air, has decided the most important thing to do is to fill the sky with tiny machines whose primary function seems to be to ensure we can watch a slightly buffered video of a cat on a unicycle from any point on the globe. We are building a cage not to keep something out, but to ensure we never have to look beyond the bars.

From the perspective of, say, a rock floating placidly in the Oort cloud, this must look like the most spectacularly pointless form of self-sabotage. The universe offers us an infinite vista, and our grand ambition is to surround our home with a glittering, lethal moat of our own trash. It’s the bureaucratic mind applied to cosmology: if we can’t manage it, we must regulate it into impossibility.

Don’t Panic, of course. The universe is under no obligation to provide us with an escape route. It’s just interesting to note that the first thing we might truly, permanently lock is the door behind us.