thank you
getting something into space is incredibly hard to do so you need to move very very fast and
first straight up to leave the atmosphere then sideways to begin a sort of circling around the
earth still tangential velocity have you guys we talked about it yesterday the spin launch they're
trying to spin something on the ground and launch into orbit so cool very very fast if you do that
successfully you can enter a low earth orbit and once in orbit it's very hard to get out of
always unless you have energy to spare sort of locked in here falling around the Earth forever
that's great for things we want to stay up like space stations and satellites and so we moved the
majority of Humanity's space infrastructure to this place just a few hundred kilometers
above the surface just high enough so that the atmosphere is so thin that orbiting things can
stay up for centuries before air resistance can slow them enough to bring them back to Earth you
could stay up there for quite a long time as long as you're moving fast enough like if you imagine
how fast you need to shoot a cannonball right for it to enter orbit you can actually work this out
it's a fun little problem you do in physics think about how how quickly does this Cannonball need to
be moving or to go around the earth once but this is also the source of our deadly trap Rockets are
really metal cylinders that keep big piles of fuel in place whenever a portion of the fuel has
been spent the empty tanks are dropped to make the rocket lighter some parts crash down to earth or
burn up in the atmosphere but most of the useless rock those are the things are on our spacex's
launches that come down and land which is pretty cool the Falcon 9s the boosters stay up and begin
to orbit the planet after Decades of space travel low earth orbit is a junkyard of spent boosters
broken satellites and millions of pieces of shrapnel from missile tests and explosions
right now we know of around 2 600 defunct satellites 10 000 objects bigger than a monitor
20 000 as large as an apple 500 000 pieces the size of a marble and at least 100 million parts
so small they can't be tracked it does sound like a lot I understand that it sounds like a lot but
people fail to realize just how big this place is um and obviously this is dangerous with these
things flying around and it is but you know it's at all different altitudes as well as how big much
bigger this sort of you know uh circumference is compared to even Earth circumference It's
mighty so people you know don't need to get their knickers in too much of a knot really
um you know we could clean this up there's things we could do this debris is moving at speeds of up
to 30 000 kilometers per hour circling Earth on crisscrossing orbits multiple times a day orbital
speeds are so fast that being hit by debris the size of a p is like being shot by a plasma gun
on impact the debris vaporizes releasing enough energy to punch holes straight through solid metal
so we've covered the space around our planet with millions of deadly pieces of Destruction
and we also put a trillion dollar Global infrastructure Network right in the danger zone
it performs critical duties essential to the modern world Global Communication GPS and
navigation collecting weather data looking out for asteroids and all manner of scientific discoveries
things we would miss very much if they suddenly went away if just one pea-sized bullet hits one of
our 1100 working satellites it will be destroyed instantly three or four satellites are already
being destroyed this way every year if satellites Collide they don't stop and fall out of the sky
it's more of a splash than a crash orbital so it might sound crazy but like one solution you could
immediately think of is um it might sound crazy but you might be able to actually from the surface
observe all this space junk and get some kind of really powerful laser it would have to be
really powerful it'd be extremely dangerous but and you could you could just track this thing
with all kind of new new methods we have and um just shoot it down just hit it vaporize it uh but
that sort of kind of laser would require a lot of energy like a lot but it could be done beads
are so fast solid pieces spray right through each other transforming the two satellites
into clouds of thousands of little things still fast enough to destroy more satellites
maybe I should turn this into a company or build a big uh laser and we can shoot down uh that sounds
fun trigger the slowest and most destructive sort of domino effect a collision Cascade
like a shotgun spray each Collision creates more bullets what was once a single tiny Target very
unlikely to hit anything becomes a wall of Destruction hungry to make I think this is
wishful thinking I don't think we actually have to worry too much about this I know people do
simulations or this sort of thing but simulations on this scale up extremely generalized and
um yeah just don't worry about this stuff too much more as more and more satellites are destroyed the
destruction accelerates exponentially eventually destroying everything parked in orbit but space is
very empty so the first few collisions may take a long time by the time we realize what's happening
it's too late one year one satellite is destroyed and that's no big deal the next year five the
year after 50 until there's nothing left listening and we may already be past the point of no return
within 10 years space around Earth May no longer be viable for long-term satellites or Rockets
the worst case scenario is horrifying a debris field made of hundreds of millions of pieces many
too small to track moving at 30 000 kilometers per hour it would effectively create a deadly barrier
around Earth possibly too dangerous to cross dreams of moon bases Mars colonies or space travel
at all may be set back centuries and the loss of hours yeah I'm not worried about this at all
I mean that I think we can solve this issue I mean it'll be really hard I just mean compared to
say like uh AGI or colonizing Mars I think this is much more solvable it's infrastructure with
current Tech and some of the technology we rely on daily back to the 1970s but it might not be too
late to clean up our mess while the space industry has become better at avoiding space junk it's
still growing fast and occasional weapon tests don't help so there have been a couple of wild
but also serious suggestions about how to quickly remove as much deadly space junk as possible
without creating more in the process here we go lots of ideas are being thrown around and some
of the most seriously considered involve capture and return missions which are being tested now
one method involves meeting a piece of junk in orbit with a small satellite loaded with
a net once caught a small rocket could be used to bring it down towards Earth targets too large for
a net might be instead caught with a harpoon on a tether instead of firing a rocket the cleaner
would deploy a large sail to produce atmospheric drag and accelerate this is kind of like that uh
I can't I can't remember the name of the movie wandering Earth or something a massive Chinese
big budget movie that was on Netflix like a couple a few years ago I think it was called
wandering Earth it was pretty cool and they were doing stuff like this orbital Decay and there are
lots of other wild sci-fi sounding proposals too some might use giant electromagnets these
magnetic tugs work that sounds brilliant by pushing on the magnetic components inside
satellites that they use too how strong are we talking here that could really who knows what
that could do to our magnetic our Earth's magnetic you know little bubble we live in
because it's really not that strong stabilize and orientate themselves in Earth's magnetic field
these may be safer and more reliable than Nets and harpoons because they never have to make contact
with the junk they're handling okay we're almost at the end of this video so I just wanted to add
it in a little bit because I'm creating this thing if you haven't heard called calvpn and a
post Quantum VPN that can literally protect you from chronic computers it's going to be really
important with how quickly quantum computers are developing they're already here it's the powerful
ones that are going to be a problem in the future maybe even about three years is my prediction
so come get it I made this and if you want to support my YouTube channel that would it would
mean the world to me no risk of accidentally breaking up their target into more junk
as for the tiniest bits of junk lasers might be the key to vaporizing them entirely Satellites
with lasers wouldn't need to visit there it's they can shoot them from far away large objects can't
exactly be shot down can be used to ablate them or burn tiny amounts of material off the site to push
the junk to a safer orbit whatever that's another good option actually rather than vaporizing it
which would take a lot of energy you can actually just move it technology we used in the end we
better start doing something soon before 100 million bullets become a trillion and the trap
is set yeah we tend to only focus on problems when they are when it's a little bit too late hey if we
don't act Arab we'll be in space might end before it's even began well we've already started not
experimenting with this but with lasers in space so uh starlink actually have this capability
they actually have lasers in space now to sort of link them up and stuff so there you go that
could be the early sort of Bedrock for trying to get these sorts of lasers in space um maybe you
could create lasers powerful enough to move the stuff away that could be on satellites themselves
do vaporize I imagine you're going to have to put them on the ground um so it just sounds like
a fun thing to do to be honest another awesome video about cures exact always love these videos
he is uh like I've said before you should win the Nobel Prize in science Communication in my opinion