By Matthew Waterman, Director, New Age Alpha
While the Kessler Syndrome, or Kessler Effect, isn’t spoken of widely in social circles, its potential impact on everyone’s day-to-day lives is nearly incalculable. Imagine a world without cell phones, GPS or anything else reliant on satellite technology and one starts to understand the implications. According to the Kessler Syndrome, however, that is a very real possibility.
The general concept involves the ever-accumulating amounts of junk orbiting the earth and, with it, the also increasing probability of a cataclysmic collision. Humans, unwittingly, have left a lot of garbage floating around in orbit. Up there, however, these materials behave very differently than on land or at sea. When traveling at approximately 22,000 MPH, something as innocuous as a paint chip in Low Earth Orbit (LOE) can hit with the force of a bullet. Now imagine if two very large objects collided, strewing vast amounts of wreckage everywhere, which began a