Don’t Star Link satellites come down on their own after a few years? There’s no way they have high enough orbits to cause any sort of Kessler syndrome effect for anything other than about 2 years max and even that’s doubtful. People really underestimate how truly massive LEO is, the satellites are not even particularly big ones. There’s just no way.
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j4k3@piefed.world 5 days ago
Russia’s own state media already admits to over 1m lost in Ukraine. I doubt most of their nukes work. More likely, NK invades SK while China invades Taiwan. The hollowness of the USA quickly becomes clear when the doors fall off of all the Boeing aircraft. The neodymium supplied FPV drone army of AliEx then comes knocking. The US is then cut off from all advanced chip foundry fab nodes.
Meanwhile, the enormous fleet of starlink satellites are already on the verge of Kessler syndrome according to a recent white paper stating they are less than 3 days way. Just targeting one of them will cut off all access to space for decades rendering ICBMs obsolete or high risk where they are very likely to be damaged and return to the region that launched them. Cutting off access to space is a superpower total war move.
echodot@feddit.uk 5 days ago
j4k3@piefed.world 5 days ago
Anton Petrov summarized the scientific white paper on YT. Maybe go watch it. Yes it is possible. It would still last decades. But probably would not propagate further up I think. Higher orbits can shut out space for centuries.
KSPAtlas@sopuli.xyz 4 days ago
AFAIK they specifically planned for this to happen to reduce the chances of Kessler syndrome (it does increase costs however)
AppleTea@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
Kessler syndrome […] less than 3 days way
Fuckin’ ace. Actually colonizing space would be a centuries long endeavor of fostering an ecosystem from scratch. So until we start propping up the ecosystem we’re living in, nobody has any business wasting resources on space boondoggles.
j4k3@piefed.world 5 days ago
Sorry to burst that bubble, but there are more rare mineral resources in a single m-type astroid than all that humans have accessed in the Holocene. Recovering a single m-type is all it takes to make all of human history to this point appear as a joke of piddly nonsense like a baby playing with sticks. Fuckwit flag planting is nonsense like a baby playing with sticks too. Even some near earth asteroids likely contain enormous wealth. Japan is the only country with the intelligence to have pursued this so far. Accessing this wealth would obsolete the inbred halfwit oligarchy of inherited wealth as they have no real merit or competence. Meritocratic achievement is toxic to their existence. Thus why only Japan pursues the endeavor. They are the only westernized country that has actually solved the inherited wealth cancer for a meritocratic balance. You do not hear about their celebrity billionaire fuckwits because no one was born into the role of gross inherited wealth.
AppleTea@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
Is it that Japan doesn’t have people born into obscene wealth or is it that, being english speakers, we just don’t hear about them?
Also, maybe we should be careful about increasing the mass of the planet. I’m sure a little here and there wouldn’t be too much of a problem… but you know… the same is true of combustion engines…
j4k3@piefed.world 5 days ago
Lol. No Japan has an enormous inheritance tax and cap that prevents it all together. It was intentionally created to stop the suicide of any society that lacks meritocracy.
Resource scarcity is behind every injustice on the planet. Stopping the scarcity problem brings everyone up to a higher standard.
foodandart@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
Yeaaaahh. I don’t see that one happening. South Korea is on point with a military response that would be the end of North Korea. Have friends that are Korean and they say the military there does not fuck around. Even now, with the public perception of the boy bands and k-pop meaning the country’s gone soft… It’s window dressing, and why the Kim family has NOT launched an invasion.
LH0ezVT@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
If two people fight with hand grenades in a boxing ring, nobody wins, only maybe somebody loses more.
The Kims might be a lot of things, like crazy, cruel or narcicist, but they are definitively not suicidal.
F_State@midwest.social 5 days ago
I think the South Korea military would triumph over the North Korean military but NK would cause substantial civilian casualties with the large amount of artillery it has along the border.
foodandart@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
Yeah, that’d be about the only way… then with the food rations going to NKs war effort, the northern populations would all-but starve… Which is happening more than it should in that country, already.
The Kim family can’t go extinct fast enough. What wretched people.
BreakerSwitch@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I will say, with SK having the lowest birthrates in the world, and the general xenophobia and attitude towards immigration in eastern Asia, I’m expecting SK’s military readiness to degrade significantly over the next 10 years. NK outliving SK was never on my bingo card before, but… Something’s gotta change or it’s going to get bad over there.
foodandart@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
Would the NK army have the food for a fight? Do they have the physical size and stamina for such a gambit? I’d be surprised if their army has the drive to give it their all in a battle.
Have been reading for at least 20 years about how the NK population has a decidedly shorter and smaller stature now, after decades of food scarcity.
Apparently as far back as the mid-00’s it affected the standards for conscription in the NK army. Not sure on that, but it would make sense.
It’s hard to know actually, there’s tons of propaganda on both sides, (and God knows, the Kim regime certainly won’t offer up actual demographic information of that nature which is truthful) but from the photos I’ve seen, the NK soldiers look awfully small compared to the SK soldiers.
BreakerSwitch@lemmy.world 4 days ago
That’s just smaller hitboxes, bro.
But seriously, I think it would take some (probably modest) backing from another world power. Realistically China, maybe Russia, though China has been burned by NK before and Russia doesn’t have anything to give right now. I think the most likely scenario is that the regime sees a waning SK as a chance and goes for it, whether it’s a sane thing to do or not
j4k3@piefed.world 5 days ago
I was mostly talking about China funding the second front by proxy. NK has already done the ramp up for production via the Russian invasion of Ukraine. NK now has units with combat experience, and Russian technology transfers, not to mentioned what China is capable of supplying directly. Samsung is the main objective. Seoul is within range of basically everything in the NK arsenal. Samsung is barely south of the city center in Suwon.
PrivateNoob@sopuli.xyz 5 days ago
AFAIK NK sent it’s troops to the ukraine front as a total expendable bullet wasters with no intention of seeing them back at all.