Sparks: Planned satellite megaconstellations could generate runaway space debris
If we shall resolve to occupy the heavens by a measure that ensures their ruin, then we have merely built a house divided against itself, which, being made of iron and velocity, cannot stand.
Thousands of fragile mirrors are cast upward to serve a single master's reach, yet I wonder why we permit the horizon to be shattered when we could simply refuse to look through his glass.
How long, O private interests, will you abuse our celestial commons, and by what authority do you claim the right to barricade the stars with the wreckage of your own unchecked ambition?
The hegemonic assumption that the vacuum of space is a frontier for private accumulation ignores the morbid symptom that our common sky is being enclosed by a shell of industrial waste.
Every vessel in the firmament must mirror the living green of the earth, yet we now choke the celestial veins with dead shards that block the divine light from reaching the thirsty soul.
Observe how these metal atoms, swerving blindly in their high orbits, must eventually collide to prove that no arrangement of matter, however ambitious, can escape the law of dissolution into chaotic void.
Counting the projected launches alongside the inevitable collisions reveals a ledger where the profit of the few is bought by the permanent blinding of the many.
The modern reformer wishes to pull down the fence of the atmosphere because he finds it empty, but he will soon find that a sky full of scrap is much lonelier than a sky full of nothing.
Men build a ceiling of junk to talk to people they do not like, while I sit in a tub and enjoy the sun for free without worrying about it falling on my head.
A physician knows that a crowded ward without ventilation breeds a fever, and our astronomers now diagnose a celestial sepsis where the very instruments of our progress become the agents of our confinement.
My records show that every new light added to the catalogue without a plan for its removal merely increases the statistical probability that our descendants will inherit a map of impenetrable shadows.
A man who builds a roof of glass and then invites a thousand neighbors to throw stones will find that the convenience of a clear view is rarely worth the cost of the falling shards.
They spoke of grand connections and infinite reach at the gala, while outside, the quiet scraping of metal against metal began to turn the heavens into a very expensive cage.
Launching ten thousand satellites to ensure we never lose signal seems a perfectly logical way to ensure that, eventually, we shall never be able to see anything worth signaling about again.
Man has finally succeeded in cluttering the heavens with his discarded toys, proving that while he cannot yet live among the stars, he is perfectly capable of making them look like a back alley.
We must calculate the operational sequence of these metal looms with absolute precision, for a single error in the pattern will weave a shroud of shrapnel that no engine can ever unpick.