Hello, It's Me, the Invisible Hand of the Marketplace.


Last Friday's fiasco with Rogers network sure caused a ruckus for the cashless society.  Merchants posted makeshift cardboard signs on their front doors warning customers they better have a valid credit card or cash or else.

The plebs weren't able to hit the ATM to get a few bucks for the weekend. Not what the immediate gratification crowd wanted to hear.

Everywhere it was the slap, slap, slap of the flat-footed from Rogers to the banks to the purveyors of all we need and yearn for to - our political caste. Through the rumble of blame dodging and the smokescreen of "no one saw it coming" emerged the vague outline of the no longer invisible hand of the marketplace and the now familiar sound of shareholder value clashing against resilience.

As I read all the sincere apologies and promises, one name came to mind - Donald J. Kessler. He was the NASA geek who first warned of the mathematical certainty of the destruction of most if not all of our satellite networks.

It's not something that could go wrong but something that, unless we do something very expensive and inconvenient about it, will go wrong as a mathematical certainty. NASA scientist Don Kessler got to thinking about all the junk in low-Earth orbit zinging around at 17,000 miles an hour. He wondered what happens when, eventually, that junk begins to impact other orbiting stuff like satellites. Even a small piece of junk is all it takes for a big satellite to explode into thousands of new bits of orbiting shrapnel just waiting to turn other spacecraft into ever more clouds of orbiting shrapnel. Eventually there'll be nothing left functioning in space and that orbital band will become unusable for, well, generations.

You know that cellphone? Nah, ain't going to work. Neither will your computer or your cable TV. Ditto for your and everyone else's GPS and that includes the military and every airline. Your ATM? Forget about it. And the transportation and distribution networks that keep food on your local store shelves, they'll go down too. If we're lucky our authorities will be able to keep some of our utilities functioning at some level, at least for a while. Then we may have just weeks to figure out how to again live as we did in the 50s.




Comments

  1. Northern PoVJuly 12, 2022 at 7:48 AM

    Don't worry, Mound. Global-heating and general eco-collapse will happen before the space lanes become a roller derby.

    Oh, about that invisible hand?
    It killed off TMX! (Until Dr. Franken-Trudeau bought it back from the grave.)

    ReplyDelete
  2. TroyJuly 12, 2022 at 2:35 PM

    China's apparently the only nation bothering about this as well. Every other nation? "Not my problem! You're on your own!" Perhaps there's some belief that the "free market" will somehow do something about all this even though up to this point, there's been no attempts.
    Maybe there's money being changed hands right about now. Meetings. Discussions. But otherwise, it's just been China yeeting and dredging other satellites so they're no longer threats.

    ReplyDelete

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