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.

Extend the metaphor and you’ll find that Kessler’s world, our Oedipus-like realm of willful blindness under the cover of technical mastery, is filled with technologically enabled fake metaphysics. We’re not so much blind to what is visible as blind to what is not. You might even go so far as to say that all technology, taken far enough, will become a manqué of transcendence, or at least a temptation to idolize a technique as a replacement for wondering about what lies beyond it. Kessler Syndrome, the condition by which satellites, multiplied in number, eventually make satellite orbits impossible, is not just a one-off phenomenon but the way we keep Tower-of-Babeling ourselves again and again along the rocky road of salvation history.

Take time, for instance. Time is immaterial and cannot be measured. What we have learned to do instead is measure something else as a stand-in. Among the first devices for doing this were sundials, discs that show the progression of shadows cast by the sun. These rudimentary timepieces were fields for shadows of sunlight but also for the physical traces of metaphysical motion. Time moves, but no one can touch it or say what it is. We know some of its effects, though, and can use physical things to bring those effects into shared knowledge. Nobody would say that a sundial measures time directly, only that it shows approximately where the sun stands in the sky, which is, in turn, another way of saying what time it is. But none of this is time itself. The whirring of the orrery and the play of light and shadow on this planet are separate from whatever time might be.

Then clocks were invented, and the concept of the sundial got transferred to a number-etched face that shows time as a function of the workings of internal gears. Clocks and sundials are fundamentally different. When Salvador Dalí wanted to show the lollygag nature of time, the weird disjuncture of the stuff, he painted pocket watches melting over railings. It wouldn’t make sense to do the same with a sundial, because sundials are just slavish reporters of the position of the sun. Clocks, though, could be mistaken not just for marking time but for “keeping” it, for corralling it into order, even for making it, each grandfather clock a little oblong factory out of which the hours and minutes of the day flow. Who made the Sun, and why? That’s inescapably a metaphysical question. Who made the watch? The Swiss, that’s who. But the hour is striking, and it’s time to start working, so no more asking silly metaphysical questions and wasting everyone’s time.

Even clocks have gone the way of the sundial. Time is now “kept” in special facilities, such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland, which keeps Coordinated Universal Time (abbreviated UTC in its French iteration). Another facility, outside Paris, at a place designated international territory, keeps track of seconds, which are one of the “seven base units of measurement” of the International System of Units (SI). “Since 1967,” NIST explains, “the SI second has been an ‘atomic’ second…defined as ‘The duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom.’” This universal second is devilishly hard to pin down. The various atomic clocks, a UTC network comprising “more than 400 clocks residing in more than 80 laboratories in more than 60 nations,” communicate with one another and average out readings to find “the time.” (The communications among facilities are often by satellite — uh oh.) In December NIST reported that “the atomic time source for all the internet time servers at the NIST Gaithersburg campus failed and exhibited a time step of approximately -10 ms [milliseconds],” a reminder that, without our technology, we still have absolutely no idea what time is, or even what time it is.

Note that, no matter how accurately we measure vibrations, the “clocks” in Paris and elsewhere do not actually measure time. It is impossible to measure time. The clocks measure the manic little dance of the cesium-133 atom, which is only an approximation for the passing of the thing we know of as time. And even that fake metaphysics is layered in human folly. The universal clock in Paris is a byproduct of the Enlightenment belief that knowledge could be standardized. The world standard is both “universal” and “Parisian” because Europeans have long thought the two are one and the same. Many of these “universalist,” that is, anti-metaphysical, thinkers were deists, at best. European man became the measuring stick during the long twilight of the gods precisely because European men led the way in turning their backs on metaphysics. Now, in the darkness of the purely secular world the “Enlightenment” philosophes created, we huddle on our little planet, counting the tics of a cesium scrap, and say we have universalized time. No, what we have done is blinded ourselves to it. Still, time keeps passing. And one day, for all of us, just as it was for the powdered-wig crowd long ago, our time will be up.

So, what does a good Kesslerian do about that? Well, obviously, he sees the collapse of his anti-metaphysical delusions as an engineering problem and decides to become immortal. The “Don’t Die” movement, championed by anti-death innovators like Bryan Johnson, is Christianity for atheists. The resurrection of Christ bought resurrection for us all, but Kesslerians don’t fiddle with the wonky metaphysics of eternal life. Tech venture capitalist Johnson, for his part, spends his days and nights in dogged pursuit of, not dying and being raised again, but just not dying. It’s immortality on the installment plan. Not even immortality. Johnson is not against dying someday but against aging, against losing control over his lifespan.

Not since Qin Shihuangdi pickled his innards with cinnabar by drinking “elixirs of immortality” prescribed by quack physicians have humans been so dead set on living forever. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, too, seem intent on making a great leap forward past the usual human lifespan. In September the two strongmen were overheard discussing their affinity for longevity during a military parade in Beijing. (The irony of planning long lives while parading weapons of mass destruction through a militantly atheist capital seems to have been lost on most of the world’s reporters.) Putin and Xi have their own, separate reasons for wanting to keep going, of course, as the alternative to the game of thrones is the assassin’s creed. But what explains the drive for a tech executive like Johnson — or for a middle manager in Illinois or a housewife in Florida? Kessler’s world explains it. It’s tech-adjacent blindness to what lies beyond. If life is all there is, then it makes sense to want more of it and, as a corollary, to want to apportion exactly how much of it will be laid out.

To wit, medical assistance in dying, or MAID, is the flip side of this coin. You live as long as you want, you die when you want. Protein shakes one day, nitrogen suffocation the next. Sabino Paciolla wrote in these pages about a pair of octogenarian German twins, former dancers who were “united in their final farewell with a double assisted suicide,” which is legal in Germany “under certain conditions” (From the Narthex, Jan.-Feb.). The Europeans gave us universal time and death on demand. The twins, Alice and Ellen Kessler, only coincidentally share a surname with the man who gave us Kessler Syndrome. That technology ends in death and despair seems to be not coincidental but a real universal.

The only problem is that this two-sided coin won’t buy a lick of metaphysics. Ditto for DNA. If your experience is anything like mine, dear reader, then you must have lost count in early childhood of the number of times you’ve been told that strings of nucleic acids are the “building blocks of life.” This is, strictly speaking, total nonsense. When a child plays with blocks, that does not mean the blocks are the child. We could say the building blocks the boy is playing with are “of the boy,” but that’s an odd construction. DNA is, likewise, not the building block of life. It’s how life builds. Life, from God, is prior, and DNA, which encodes the physical traces of God’s life, comes long after. But you’ll not get nearer to God by climbing up a ladder-like double helix. As with life, so with time — and so with the mind and the soul, as well. Decode the human genome and you’ve learned nothing about the human person. You can go on piling up physical effects unto infinity and you will be no closer to understanding the nonphysical things that animate our world.

At which point, exasperated, I suppose you have three choices: you can fall to your knees and beg God’s mercy; you can call a death-dealing “doctor” to help you off yourself; or you can take umpteen vitamin supplements and sleep in a hyperbaric chamber so you won’t have to feel the sting of death for a while yet at least.

Or maybe there’s a fourth way: adrenaline rush as distraction from mortality. Have you seen the videos of the daredevils who climb skyscrapers and TV towers and dangle off impossible ledges by one hand? Wu Yongning, a Chinese “rooftopper” who took palm-sweating videos of himself atop sky-piercing structures, plummeted 62 stories to his death in 2017. But he was not the first or the last to risk his life for Internet fame. Those people hanging off ledges with their selfie sticks are different from the Flying Wallendas and Evel Knievels of the past. For the tightrope walkers and canyon jumpers of old, death was a hard and fast part of every equation. Death was the end of the line. It was also the chalk square on the tip of the cue, the whetstone that kept the razor sharp, the polish on the lens. People who attempted dizzying feats before the Internet age truly did defy death. But for the YouTube death-defiers, the inevitable fall is just part of the channel they’re running. They die, the death video goes viral, and the show goes rolling on. Even those who don’t tempt death but still meet the Reaper are treated as clicks along an endless progression of sad entertainment. Cynical online commenters often say some variation of “game over” whenever someone meets an untimely fate. You see it in virtually every language. A news item a few years back told of a man in China who accidentally flew his hang glider into a high-voltage power line. Another man who watched the horror unfold said, in a Beijing accent after the shower of sparks had subsided, “Wanrle,” meaning literally, “He played,” that is, “Game over.” On to the next piece of entertainment.

In Kessler’s world, in other words, you live, you die, and you still end up having no idea what is going on beyond the buzzing, blooming confusion of the world of your senses. But the more you strive to gain control of what the metaphysical tide brings in — time and life, to be exact, not the glossy magazines but the fraught mysteries of human existence — the more you lose everything. In the Gospel of St. John, Our Lord teaches, “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” To which Bryan Johnson, Qin, Xi, Putin, or the death-happy bureaucrats who run the MAID capitals of Switzerland and Canada might reply, “Yes, but we want to have power over life and death in our own hands, even if we don’t understand what those things are.”

Kessler’s world has its consolations, of course. It’s comforting to pretend there’s nothing beyond the physical universe, and nothing happens after we die — comforting, that is, until we reach the physical universe’s limit for us personally and sail into the great unknown, having only Christ and our sins to speak for us. Yes, maybe it’s all too obvious why we hole up in our unhealthy basements and flood the Internet with porn.

Modern man doesn’t like looking up at the stars. It makes him feel small and cold. He prefers planetariums. Flip a switch and get constellations in the daytime. It’s the same principle as the transition from the sundial to the wristwatch. From life as a gift to life as a domain to be controlled. Keep relying on technology and, in the end, technology will cloud your vision, take you out of the real world and into a temporarily deluding fake one. When the cataclysm of the satellites that Donald Kessler predicted comes true, we will have to go back to that real world again, the world in which we live and die in mystery. None of us is ready for it. It is dreadful to face our mortality. But we had better do it now and get our souls in order. Because, no matter how hard we try, we will have to leave Kessler’s world sooner or later.

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