"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."

Except they didn't discover new superconductors. Their AI came up with a novel idea to discover new superconductors, and they didn't even bother to check whether the results it hallucinated checked out.

The distinction between "having an idea" and publishing a paper where you demonstrate that the idea has merit, where you validate it, is one you shouldn't have to really explain to a high school student, much less a grad student publishing their first paper.

In a "three felonies a day" universe?

It's trained on the speech of online commenters like us; That's where it's getting these. I'm not gonna change just because Timmy the Zoomer has been with his LLM girlfriend for the past three years and occasionally I remind him of her. I'm not going to deliberately code switch into somebody who doesn't open a new tab to Google things as he talks about them. And you can take my bullet point lists from my cold, dead hands.

It was not easy for your local triple A baseball game being streamed to 500 viewers. This approach scales down.

<1000km LEO would take a hundred generations to resume operations.

The collision you note, along with another couple that have occurred, dramatically increased overall trackable debris counts, by thousands, when we only had a few thousand satellites and under a hundred thousand debris items. Secondary collisions were much less of an issue than they are now, and they are now much less of an issue than they will be in five years per current plans.

Also, ball bearings or the military equivalent tungsten BB's, are prefigured for maximum lifespan and maximum distribution, as well as being untrackable from day 1.

"Note: archive.org, or web.archive.org, run by the Internet Archive and the most-used web archive on Wikipedia, is uninvolved with and entirely separate from archive.today. Please keep using archive.org"

A half-hour boost phase through LEO to get to higher orbit is dramatically less risky than spending 87600 hours there over a 10-year orbital lifespan. In the event that it all goes asymptotic, what sort of timescales would be afflicted by collision risks 10^6 or 10^9 or 10^12 greater than what exist now, I am uncertain.

Armor can protect you against the smallest debris which post the least risk and decay the fastest. Everything else, not so much.

A question for you though - does that insulation vaporizing itself inside a whipple shield generate secondary debris comprised of the whipple shield and condensed aluminum droplets??

Everything in low Earth orbit is moving at 7600m/s. A ~10g projectile moving that fast has an energy of 580,000 joules. Getting hit by something moving that fast is roughly equivalent to getting hit by a whole ammo case of bullets at the same speed. There is no armor that can protect you; Even the most solid objects behave like fluids at this relative velocity, potentially incurring more damage from the explosion / shockwave splatter than a thinner object that would allow you to overpenetrate.

A cardboard box of ball bearings with a handgrenade in it in LEO being triggered could wipe out nearly everything up there, and depending on the exact altitude it could effectively mine LEO and prevent humanity from using it for a long time, with a selectable duration between months or millennia depending on altitude.

"Space warfare" in LEO is a matter of everybody walking around with a personal nuclear weapon strapped to their back that can be activated on a hair trigger. We may well wipe everything out by accident, if it gets too crowded or because somebody stubbed their toe. Regardless, there is no selectivity, and any actor with space launch capability can blot out our access at will in ways that will outlive them.

Basically our only hope of continued use is things that persuade us to refrain from attempting to incorporate space into a theatre of war. That box of ball bearings should have higher stakes on the escalation ladder than a tactical nuclear strike. And it probably shouldn't be there in the first place.

If the device is recording me all the time and silently uploading it, and I'm not aware, I can't give my consent. That's wiretapping, zero-person-consent.

Ask how you (or for that matter, a jury) would feel about your phone doing the same.

This is moderately misleading in some ways, but illustrative enough and also technically valid if somebody wants to model it accurately.

We are another week of iteration away from "Hire an assassin on the dark web to take Huggingface executives' children hostage".