Kessler’s World

People pretty much anywhere in rural America can connect to the Internet nowadays. Pretty much anywhere in the world, really. Elon Musk’s Starlink has made the worldwide web literally worldwide.

When you look behind all the data streaming, what you find are thousands of satellites in perilous orbit. There are some 14,000 satellites flitting around Earth (some still running, some long dead), of which about 9,000 are workhorses for SpaceX, one of Musk’s many companies. Fourteen thousand satellites is a lot, and that number is almost certain to increase. In January 2026 the Federal Communications Commission approved Musk’s plan to launch 7,500 more satellites over the next few years, in addition to the 9,400 or so he already has flying. SpaceX wants to have around 30,000 satellites in orbit — and chances are good that it eventually will — but for now, Musk will have to settle for “only” around half that.

Space is a big place, and a couple dozen thousand satellites might not sound like that many when you consider the sheer size of the real estate they traverse. But all it takes is one collision between orbiting objects to set in motion a chain reaction that would make it impossible for spacecraft to pierce beyond the veil of space debris. If you don’t believe me, ask Donald Kessler, an astrophysicist who wrote a paper in 1978 predicting that as the number of objects in low-earth orbit increases, the collisions among those objects, and the pieces and parts they scatter as they collide — bolts, solar-panel chips, gold-foil confetti, flecks of paint, battery components, frayed wires, camera lenses, NASA stickers — will become unmanageable. If that happens, then space travel and the dream of communication with other life forms are over. Once the satellites get blasted to smithereens by the flak from their disemboweled cousins, we will be back to landlines again, or maybe the Pony Express or even the telegraph. At any rate, in our zeal to send cat videos to one another from the southern tip of Argentina to the Siberian steppe, to the island of Tasmania and all points between, we will have sealed ourselves beneath a floating layer of space junk and rendered society largely incommunicado again after a brief season of effortless (and largely meaningless) Instagram posting. There’s more than a fitting irony to that kind of end to the Internet.

Consider what the Internet has become in the relatively short time it has been available in almost every corner of the globe. YouTube is not just a hobby but our epistemological event horizon. For many of us, our lives are almost entirely online now. It’s not just that when the satellites die we’ll have to find something else to do with our spare time besides ridiculing one another on Facebook. The Internet has besieged not only our senses but our souls. It has made us forget how to look to the heavens, how to raise our eyes above the level of our own discourse. For many of us, the spectacle and noise of the worldwide web are all we see and hear. And at the tail end of these decades of tunnelling into our reflections and reverberations, we have found AI, which many now believe is a friend, a spouse, even a god. We produced all manner of distractions and then learned how to combine and amplify them until — voilà — those distractions became “intelligent” and took over our psyches like viruses taking over a mainframe. We conceitedly call ourselves homo sapiens (sapiens is Latin for wise or intelligent), but not even earthworms are as easily fooled as we are.