Plasma physicist here. While this is an idea worthy of study, the answer to the (spaceweatherarchive.com) title question is "no". The researcher's article makes simple errors in what they call " undergraduate physics" (electricity and magnetism), in basic plasma physics, and in basic algebra.
As one straightforward example, their estimate of the (change in) Debye length ignores that their equations (2 and 3) are in terms of the square of the Debye length, so the purported change should be only sqrt as large.
As another example, it's not clear why the author focuses on aluminium in the upper atmosphere, or worries about small particles of aluminium shielding the earth's magnetic field from space. While a conductive shell can shield a changing magnetic field, it needs to have long-range conductive paths. A mesh has this property, but a mesh is not the same as a suspended dispersed powder, even if the individual powder particles are conductive on the nano-scale.
You first plasma physicist in this topic. I'm electronics engineer, but learn plasma physics also, so I also see very obvious mistakes.
But I also have ballistics knowledge and know about Sun wind and light pressure on particles, and I bet, just light pressure is enough to clear space from powder in very short time. Even if threat is real, will need just few months to clear space from dust.
Simple physics suggests, macroobjects, like satellites of classic size (kilograms and tens centimeters) could for long time be on orbits, because high ratio of mass to square, but microparticles (micrometer scale or less), have much less mass to square ratio, so light just blow them away.
> Here it will be shown that the mass of the conductive particles left behind from worldwide distribution of re-entry satellites is already billions of times greater than the mass of the Van Allen Belts.
That estimates the mass of the Van Allen belts at 11 grams
Which makes me wonder about the disparity in energy levels between the classes of particles and if its a case of talking about icebergs vs superheated steam.
It seems they're using different kinds of particle counts for the mass of the Van Allen belts and the mass of the satellites and meteors. The high-energy dissociated subatomic particles in the Van Allen belts do not form from decaying meteorites or satellites unless you put those meteorites and satellites in a particle accelerator.
And further, the 'textbook undergraduate physics problem' of finding the magnetic field outside a conductive shell assumes that infinitesimal concentrations of aerosolized conductive particles form a fully conductive shield.
Yes, I understand that when heated to a plasma these concentrations matter, but it's disingenuous to compare them in the way the article does.
First thought that struck me was the Star Trek Episode where the scientist found out Warp Drive was weakening space-time, so that it could 'rip open'.
The scientist were shunned, but eventually did prove it.
But even then, the Federation could not "stop" using warp drive.
It was one of first instances I saw that even in Star Trek, with all the high ideals, once confronted with something that would shut down progress and travel, they also just kept on going. They didn't do anything about it.
We can't even fantasize about humans coming together to solve a civilization ending threat. Stories where we do come together, we reject, they seem un-natural, they are deemed un-realistic.
Yeah humans are not too good at gracefully paradigm shifting. That is why in academia people usually wait for the old ones to die off before something truly new can be introduced. I'm not singling out academia, this is pretty much all over the the place.
This Star Trek just to show no matter how technologically advanced we are, we are still don't like go out side of our world view. Kind makes one thing should we all be focusing on technological advances, or how we can more gracefully shifting our paradigm, instead of waiting for old guys to die off.
It was a realistic response, and an episode years ahead of its time in its climate change allegory (several years ahead of an inconvienent truth for example)
Alas aside from a couple of references later in S7 of TNG, trek then decided to handwave a technical solution in the background and we never heard of the problem again.
Indeed Trek in later years (Picard season 2) also said that climate change in the Trek universe was solved by magical microbes from Europa.
The paper from this article says that only 450kg of charged material from meteorites enters the relevant part of the atmosphere each year. Yet the total amount of meteorites entering is somewhere in the range of 10^7 to 10^9kg per year [0]. I know the really small stuff slows down too quickly to burn up completely, but does anyone know why such a small fraction of the meteorites burns up in this region compared to satellites? Or is that 450kg number just wrong?
Bottom end of the range: 10^7Kg per year would be about 27.5 tonnes per day.
The article references another piece[1] where they quote 54t per day, a similar number.
There's then an estimate made of how much of that is Aluminium - 1%.
I guess the author ran the 54t / 100 calc and came up with 0.45 instead of 0.54 ... a simple typo.
The key point is most of the natural stuff doesn't hang around up there.
Top end (10^9 Kg) of the range we get about 2750t per day natural origin.
And at 1% for Aluminium that's 27.5t per day.
That number is not far off the 29t estimated daily burn for the full Starlink v2 constellation they quote.
Also:
I notice that the Lodders article focussed specifically on Aluminium as it had been proposed as a method for geoengineering albedo.
There are other metals in the natural origin material, and I don't see why we should exclude those from affecting the Van Allen belts - is it only Aluminium that's bad?
Comparing the Starlink burn to the Van Allen material mass seems irrelevant when there's perhaps a few hundred tonnes per day of naturally arriving metals around too.
It's not obvious to me this topic can be waved away as not an issue though.
The number sounds wrong. Most meteorites are made of conductive material. And I've never heard of small meteors not burning up. The energy still has to go somewhere.
I for one would like to see the satellites modified with a heat shield so they could punch through and hit a designated deorbit zone. I would even offer my backyard, but I fear it's too small.
Wouldn't that be the ultimate tourist attraction? "Witness the next deorbit round tomorrow at Crater Park Observatory!"
I've often wondered if you could take out a boat there to see a particularly impressive de-orbit. Maybe when they do the ISS, which is scheduled to go there eventually.
There have been cases where craft ended up in inhabited areas. iirc one hit australia and upset some people a few years ago?
I've thought about the idea of launching a whole payload full of sand and marbles in a way that produces a show like that over a wide area. But now it's getting nearly impossible with so many satellites up there.
I'm sure I want it. Unfortunately my house is too close to the center of my backyard.
My neighbours are too close too. Any stray parts would cut into the proceeds of ticket sales to the bunker at the center where you can watch live streams of the parcels hitting on top of you.
It wouldn't. Small objects, like satellites, decelerate to terminal velocity. The impact of one of those would be the same as if they fell from an aeroplane.
But don’t satellites have toxic components? While most of it will be burnt up some bits get to the ground.
Satellites are made from material, and can’t be safely disassembled. Rentry is uncontrolled incineration, depending on a large part of the pollutants being diluted across the sky, and the ground and water on which they fall.
That depends on how you define "toxic". If you mean toxic fuels, most do not.
However the idea is just terribly impracticable. Heat shields are heavy and more than that you would need to design your satellite around the heat shield. It would need to be able to fold up like origami into the heat shield. You also need to add extra fuel to perform the targed re-entry. This whole idea is bad.
Hydrazine is quite common and quite toxic, of the "seek medical attention immediately" variety. 1 ppm is a threshold for exposure for a few hours, satellites can launch with hundreds of pounds of the stuff.
A crashed satellite would not be safe to be around, you might get liver failure if you go poking around one and get a good ammonia-like whiff of hydrazine.
Hydrazine is certainly on some satellites, but by numbers of satellites launched and by mass of satellites launched hydrazine is not on a minority of them. Most satellites being launched by mass and number are now Starlink satellites which don't have hydrazine. Even then, the second largest category of satellites is smallsats and cubesats which often have no propulsion at all or use cold gas.
The semiconductors in satellites do have some toxic elements that would be released from otherwise inert conditions on burning up on reentry. but that's orders of magnitude less than what's put into the atmosphere from burning coal and gas. Coal contains lots of stuff other than carbon.
Reducing the charged particles in the magnetosphere != weakening the Earth's magnetic field.
The energy in the Earth's magnetic field (above the surface) is about the same as the yield of a 200 megaton bomb. It is produced by currents deep in the Earth, in the core; there is no way satellites could have any effect on that.
Now, getting rid of energetic particles trapped in the magnetosphere is a different question. And that would be a very useful and positive thing to do, as it would make space safer for both satellites and astronauts.
Yes, people have looked into this, but I don't have many details. One proposal was to put charged tethers into orbit in the magnetosphere. Particles would be deflected by them, some into the loss cone where they'd enter the atmosphere and be removed.
I don't think people should pay much attention until that happens. This person has never published a paper before and she's the CEO of a company selling "solar flare insurance". https://www.f6s.com/company/astroplane With a company name that sounds like "astral plane"...
> From an astrophysics perspective, “Space Katrina” may be the only thing any of us should be working on. Even a small solar event could dismantle the satellites and electronics that now determine our entire lives. If we do not work to mitigate such a catastrophic event, we risk returning to a pre-technological era or worse. Exoplanet research commonly shows that solar flare events often blow off planetary atmospheres, evaporate oceans, and sterilize lithospheres. The immediate threat is a 2nd Carrington event that demolishes a large array of satellites and power grids.
Uhhhh what? I'm quite sure we don't have any evidence of exoplanets having their atmosphers blown off, their oceans evaporated (we haven't even really found oceans), nor have we found any life to sterilize. And the thought of a Carrington event putting us back to a "pre-technological era" is the junk I see out of clickbait stuff off youtube, not what I'd expect to hear from a scientist.
people seem to vastly overestimate the size of satellite swarms relative to the available space around the earth... imagine asking a similar question about radio towers of wifi routers, which are much more numerous
Indeed. Problems are things to be solved, not a reason to put up blockers preventing things from happening.
Kessler syndrome is even greatly misunderstood because of movies like Gravity. People think of it as one satellite getting kicked over and then there's a sudden chain reaction of satellite after satellite being destroyed in the time span of hours/days. When in fact it's likely that Kessler syndrome is probably already happening, but it's hard to tell.
The solution is to pass new laws on satellite disposal so the problem doesn't get worse and over time figure out methods to dispose of what's up there. The most important things to get rid of are the very large debris as those can act as nexuses for further debris generation as they're "worn away" by other particulate dust debris and micrometeorites.
Not really what I was saying. I'm talking about being obstructionist for the sake of being obstructionist, primarily focused around appeals to nature and digging for reasons that can be used as an excuse to justify the appeal to nature.
If the end result of your thinking is "this has too many bad effects so we can never do this entire category of thing" then you've gone off the cliff. The solution is to fix the bad side effects while continuing the beneficial thing rather than saying you can't do anything at all.
Is this article saying we shouldn’t use mega constellations? It’s a rather dry presentation of napkin math. As other comments have said if this is a genuine issue then we can solve it.
There is value in investigating the downside of technology because it helps us address problems before they occur. Of the the more famous modern example is CFCs and The Montreal Protocol. There was a genuine risk to all life on earth found via similar science, we got together and agreed on a solution plus we still have whipped cream in a can and refrigerators.
There is a fundamental difference between doomerism and investigating potential risk. Of course we should avoid doomerism but saying “hey guys this might be an issue let’s think about it a bit” is an important part of technological advancement.
Mega constellations could prevent other nations from entering space just by blocking launch windows or hell equip them with energy or kinetic weapons a group can block off space for others..
> Mega constellations could prevent other nations from entering space just by blocking launch windows
I suspect that the reason stuff like this gets traction is because of the current crop of satellite visualizations. Most of them make it look like Earth is absolutely blanketed in satellites. But that's primarily a pixel size limitation - it's not possible to show how small satellites actually are in a reasonably sized image.
If you think about it logically - there are a couple thousand cars in orbit: what percent of the surface does that cover? Not much - that doesn't even cover much of a 2nd tier city. And they have very predictable trajectories.
In short, yes - it's theoretically possible. But not a realistic concern. Especially with current launch prices. One of the only reasons Starlink is so big is because SpaceX gets to launch at cost instead of at market price.
E.g. Brilliant Pebbles, many thousands of kinetic interceptors in LEO to deny space to the enemy. But using it would be WW3; we'd have bigger things to worry about then.
I grew up watching Jurassic Park, and the main takeaway was technology is amazing, but many people will abuse it to get what they want without any regard for potential devastating consequences, often ignoring any logical argument against it if they've already found a path towards profitability.
I think the book is better, it stresses the gap between innovation (particularly driven by startup capitalism) and government regulation. Per the book, when scientists are driven by a profit motive they have an incentive to be secretive to keep their competitors in the dark, and naturally, also keep government regulators in the dark. This mirrors a common observation on HN, that American tech startups profit by finding ways around traditional regulation (Amazon getting around local sales tax, Uber getting around taxi medallion systems, electric scooter rental deploying into cities faster than their sidewalk clutter can be regulated, etc.)
It's still weird to me how quickly and completely discourse around privacy on the internet shifted from "who are these scary anonymous internet people in chat rooms and why you shouldn't tell them anything" to "routinely publicly post just about everything about your life"
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Do you have some specific refutation to the arguments made in this article? Otherwise, it's unclear what the value of your comment is - you could literally make it about any claim of any side effect of any technology!
Doesn’t come off as shallow or a dismissal of the work. Maybe tangential, but OP is just voicing their disapproval of the common tendency to dismiss new ideas, often motivated by fear or stubbornness rather than a real and unsolvable problem with the idea. The comment is critical, and at worst it implies the article fell into an unfortunate pattern.
> You could literally make it about any claim of any side effect of any technology!
Agreed.
Edit: after RTFA, I definitely get how both OP’s and my comment could be seen as unnecessary.
Question to all here: anybody (except me) learn plasma physics and understand what author write about?
Only I see so obvious mistakes in physics?
1. Debye length DECREASE is harmful, but he talks about INCREASE.
2. When aluminium vapor become conductor? Why aluminium should be vapor there? And why author think, all these THOUSAND tons of vapor should lift to 400km from 60-70km where satellites really burning?
I think this is less likely to be a problem than we think, because of space refurbishment programs that include the capability of gathering satellites, repurposing/refueling, or aggregating them for future use.
Whether this researcher is correct or not, it certainly seems like the potential side effects of putting such large quantities of electronics and conductive particles into orbit is something that we should be seriously studying sooner rather than later. Are there inter-governmental agencies working on this problem?
The other thing that came to me is maybe companies like Starlink should be required to retrieve their satellites when they reach EOL rather than let them disintegrate.
In principle it might do something if they mostly turn into charged particles, but it's unlikely to amount to much. It only takes a bit of conductive metal to influence a magnetic field. Creating one of significant scale is much more difficult, and requires more specific circumstances than the metal being merely conductive.
Aiui, you don't actually need a magnetosphere to get many of the beneficial effects on atmospheric retention, you just need the bit that's directly between you and the sun. Apparently that's a lot easier.
Fact is that it will a endless quarrel between scientists, until enough time has passed, where it is either:
* forgotten as the problem was not real
* too late as the problem was real
History will repeat itself subtly, that's the only certainty
Humanity has actually solved many issues brought up by scientists before they caused drastic harm. A few that come to mind are acid rain, smog, DDT, and CFC’s.
Catalytic converters in aggregate costs something like 1/2 a trillion dollars for clean air. We don’t hear about Acid rain because sulfur dioxide emissions are down well over 90% thus dealing with the actual problem.
Even CO2 emissions are well below the “do nothing” projections. Instead of being hopeless humanity has a long track record of some basic cost benefit analysis and then mitigating issues.
Name? AFAIK those things didn't have names. The 70s and 80s were filled with huge insect plagues on Asia, Africa and South America that disrupted the agriculture of several countries.
> The 70s and 80s were filled with huge insect plagues on Asia, Africa and South America that disrupted the agriculture of several countries.
And had nothing to do with DDT. If you’re thinking there was widespread ecological harm from pesticides, we didn’t stop using pesticides people swapped to different pesticides.
That depends on the profits. The problem is solved only if the cost of fighting regulations (misinformation, lobbying, discrediting, defaming, bribing and sabotage) is less than the profits people make by causing the problem in the first place. There are several examples of this - but none more obvious than the climate catastrophe.
The worlds CO2 PPM would be significantly higher if nobody had done anything to mitigate the issue. America’s per capita CO2 emissions are down 6.6 tons (31%) per person just from 2000.
Last year that saved ~2.2 Billion tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere.
People look at China’s growing emissions and get concerned, but just imagine if they still got 81% of their electricity from coal instead of already getting ~2.2 TWh of electricity per year from renewables. Battery electric cars already make up 26% of new cars sales in China and those cars are powered by an increasingly green grid.
Clearly climate change is still a major issue, but it’s a major issue being actively addressed.
> America’s per capita CO2 emissions are down 6.6 tons (31%) per person just from 2000.
That's a completely wrong way to look at it. A country can lower its emissions by outsourcing the activities that make them. Do I have to elaborate on what America could have been outsourcing to China since 2000?
The per capita C02 emissions, assuming that you don't ignore all of those that happen outside the country, have kept increasing since 2000.
> Clearly climate change is still a major issue, but it’s a major issue being actively addressed.
I would argue that it is not being actively addressed at all. Hell we don't even agree on whether we need to "accelerate our emissions with the hope that a miracle will happen and give us a technology that saves us" or "slow down and start preparing society for a world with less energy".
> could have been outsourcing to China since 2000?
No need to guess. You can actually look at what was imported and exported and it’s nowhere close to making up that gap. 2.2 Billion tons / year isn’t difficult to track down.
> I would argue that it is not being actively addressed at all.
Coal is dying, oil and natural gas aren’t nearly as plentiful. Even if you assume we’re going to extract all the oil and natural gas that exists the worst case is net zero by 2100, with better options leaving more carbon in the ground. As 2 °C means ~620 ppm that’s seemingly already off the table which wasn’t guaranteed 20 years ago.
> You can actually look at what was imported and exported
You will have to elaborate on that. Do you mean that somewhere, online, are listed all the INDIRECT emissions of everything that was imported? Where?
> 2.2 Billion tons / year isn’t difficult to track down.
It's not like a country imports parcels of CO2, how do you think it works? If we could track down the CO2 emissions of goods, we could write it on the packaging and let people choose the one they want.
But we can't, because it's everything but simple.
> Even if you assume we’re going to extract all the oil and natural gas that exists the worst case is net zero by 2100
You do realize that it is still largely enough CO2 to make large portions of Earth (around the equator) literally unliveable for humans? Meaning that billions of people will have to relocate, meaning global instability, wars and famines absolutely everywhere, right?
No need for that kind of grunt work, plenty of people have wandered that before you. China trade alone has a smaller impact so here’s numbers based on total net imports - exports: https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
In 2000 US emissions totaled 6.01 billion tons vs 6.25 billion in terms of consumption.
In 2021 that then drops to 5.03 billion tons total vs 5.57 billion in terms of consumption.
To scale per capita numbers divide 6.25 B / 281.4 million in 2000 and then multiple by 331.8 million in 2021. Which suggests 7.4 B T if we had done nothing vs 5.57 = a gap of 1.8 B tons over a shorter period.
> You do realize that it is still largely enough CO2 to make large portions of Earth (around the equator) literally unliveable for humans? Meaning that billions of people will have to relocate, meaning global instability, wars and famines absolutely everywhere, right?
The projections that suggest larger areas become uninhabitable assume massive contributions of CO2 from coal which are already unrealistic. Roughly half the the words coal is being burned in China but they are transitioning fast. “In 2020, China committed to have 1,200 GW of renewables capacity by 2030, but is on track to meet that goal five years early.” They added 216 GW of solar PV in 2023 alone, meanwhile demand is increasing by around 6% / year, so rather than just slow coal power plant construction it’s looking like they are going to start significantly curtailing coal electric production in 2024.
It’s said that 1.5C assumes China will end coal use by 2060, but the sooner they start cutting the longer they have to finish.
> America’s per capita CO2 emissions are down 6.6 tons per person just from 2000. Last year that saved ~2.2 Billion tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere. People look at China’s growing emissions and get concerned, but just imagine if they still got 81% of their electricity from coal instead of getting ~2.2 TWh of electricity per year from renewables.
All those claims ring hollow after all the serious damage to the biosphere that has been done and the rate at which the world is barreling down into a catastrophe. We have still not settled on where the current temperature rise will settle. What's the point of gloating when issue has not been addressed?
> The worlds CO2 PPM would be significantly higher if nobody had done anything to mitigate the issue.
The excess CO2 PPM would have been significantly lesser if the scientists were taken seriously when it mattered. The first paper on the global greenhouse effect was is 1892 - more than 130 years ago. There was more than enough time to develop and switch to something else. Instead we got everything from misinformation campaigns, political double speaks, sabotaged careers and research - all so that some people could protect their comfortable, but exploitative revenue streams. This goes back to the fundamental problem I was talking about - problems will be solved as long as it doesn't stand in the way of profits. Otherwise, any collateral damage is acceptable to some.
> What's the point of gloating when issue has not been addressed?
It is being addressed. A month before net zero the problem won’t be over, but it’s also far from unaddressed.
Progress is about rates of change not success. A real argument can be made that we are more than 1/3 of the way to net zero. Back in 1892 nobody was willing to give up heating their homes with coal, but today are homes can remain toasty without the need to burn fossil fuels. Coal is almost dead so it’s mostly oil and natural gas which are being replaced and far less plentiful.
If nothing else at current oil consumption proven reserves run out around 2070. Humanity could absolutely fuck the world beyond recognition using coal, oil isn’t as plentiful.
Svante Arrhenius calculated the problem with CO2 in the atmosphere in 1896. I hope we don't wait that long to take modelling seriously the next time we screw something up.
I do not agree that this study can be dismissed so easily.
The arguments about the possible influence of the satellite remains are plausible.
This is something that nobody has thought about before, so it is normal that it cannot be known yet whether this will ever be a serious problem or not.
Nonetheless, like for any other potential source of pollution, future studies are needed to monitor the effects of end-of-life satellites and determine whether they are important enough to warrant some regulatory action, or not.
It's absolutely appropriate for all of those tentative words to be used in this paper. It's raising a very interesting and potentially very important notion, and that is the merit of the paper. Sometimes the merit of a paper can be the evidence that is presented, but it doesn't need to be the case. This one is a very clear call for investigation. It's also an important part of academic publishing to be very clear when evidence is lacking - part of the point of doctoral training is to train the student to not claim something is true where there isn't sufficient evidence. If you're in your final examination for your doctorate and you are asked a question that you don't know the answer to, it's absolutely appropriate to respond with "I don't know". In fact, some examiners will deliberately ask such a question to check that you will respond like that.
The article presents a serious argument as to why this is a possible danger. You don't try to engage with the article, or present a counter-argument.
Given the terrible consequences of weakening the Earth's magnetic field, "We don't know for sure it will happen so we simply shouldn't worry about it," seems unwise.
As one straightforward example, their estimate of the (change in) Debye length ignores that their equations (2 and 3) are in terms of the square of the Debye length, so the purported change should be only sqrt as large.
As another example, it's not clear why the author focuses on aluminium in the upper atmosphere, or worries about small particles of aluminium shielding the earth's magnetic field from space. While a conductive shell can shield a changing magnetic field, it needs to have long-range conductive paths. A mesh has this property, but a mesh is not the same as a suspended dispersed powder, even if the individual powder particles are conductive on the nano-scale.