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FCC approves giant space mirror as astronomers warn of risks to the night sky
(www.thebrighterside.news)
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2026
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By that logic you wouldn't mind if I loosed a bag of mosquitos in your house, would you?
I love this comment so much and I love “loosed” as a past tense verb even more.
Well let's run with that. If you put a single mosquito in my house, I would have a higher ratio of mosquito to air than low earth orbit currently has in its ratio of satellites to empty space. (Seriously)
It's easy to remove any number of mosquitos from your house, 1 person and a swatter can get it done. It's incredibly expensive, laborious and dangers to remove LEO satellites. If something malfunctions then it's essentially a stuck there until shot or nudged down.
Well, it wasn't my metaphor, I'm not really defending it.
That said, you do seem to have missed the point of a metaphor. Nobody is arguing that mosquitos in a house are more of a problem than satellites... Comparing the two directly was not anyone's intention.
Sure it wasn't a great comparison in the first place. What I'm trying to communicate is that astronomers already have to deal with space trash as is, it's a legitimate problem to their observations. Having a giant object to reflect potentially, and without constant upkeep certainly, become especially large space trash. Removing faulty equipment is already an inefficient expensive process. Everything becomes depreciatied at some point. I'm just hoping if this type of project comes to pass that it also has an plan in case of accident or insolvency.