Very informative illustration OGF, Which confirms that the earths
atmosphere is indeed, to all intents and purposes only four miles
thick, no more than a short walk across town? Compared to the dia
of the globe this is insignificant imo? And l believe that given enough
time, it is possible for us to cause enough change to trigger off a
natural process which will then have to complete its course?
I totally agreenwith you that humans alone cannot start a process
off, but if a natural cycle has allready started and is nearing its peak
then our inputs could produce a sort of multiplyer effect?
Thanks for the diagramns.
Donkeyman!
While recording the annual Perseid meteor shower from Hawaii, this camera happened to capture a parade of satellites. The group of 15 dots moving through the sky are SpaceX’s Starlink satellites.
As of July 2023, there are 4,519 Starlink satellites in orbit, of which 4,487 are operational.
A “streak” of Starlink satellites:
Dhara Patel, an astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich said: “These satellites are about the size of a table, but they’re very reflective, and their panels reflect lots of the Sun’s light, which means that we can see them in images that we take with telescopes. These satellites are also big radio wave users… and that means they can interfere with the signals that astronomers using. So it also affects radio astronomy as well.”
Dr Dave Clements, an astrophysicist from Imperial College London, believes the satellites could have a real impact on observations. "They present a foreground between what we’re observing from the Earth and the rest of the Universe. So they get in the way of everything. And you’ll miss whatever is behind them, whether that’s a nearby potentially hazardous asteroid or the most distant Quasar in the Universe.”
He said it would be particularly troublesome for telescopes taking large surveys of the sky, such as the future Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) in Chile.
He explained: “What we want to do with LSST and other telescopes is to make a real-time motion picture of how the sky is changing. Now we have these satellites that interrupt observations, and it’s like someone’s walking around firing a flashbulb every now and again.”
Inevitably, as the pursuit of profit takes precedence over the pursuit of knowledge, the skies of Earth will be littered with thousands, even millions, of metallic man-made objects …
