A Boring Dystopia

You were looking at a mostly dark sky because of light pollution. If there is no clouds, a night sky is anything but dark and empty.

Don't worry too much yet, it's still bound to get worse

I wonder what those "no contact" tribes think of the increase in moving stars

Space is pretty big and accidental collisions like that are quite unlikely actually. But of course space debris is a real problem, just not quite in the way you describe I think.

Thankfully they're low enough orbit that their orbit would decay pretty quickly. It'd be a superb show as the sky lit up with millions of pieces of burning debris. Not sure what it would do for the atmosphere though. It would be a fair amount of metals being vaporised.

That would actually be a dope terrorist movie plot. Just launching a satellite with the sole purpose of destroying as many satellites as possible.

We had laser background options for our family photos as kids and my mom would never let us get them.

It's not nearly as much of a problem as this image would suggest. The processing method used in this image was specifically chosen to highlight the satellite tracks. This method would have hidden them entirely.

That has nothing to do with it. This only affects long exposure photography, you would never notice this with your naked eye.

You should absolutely be able to see the stars when out in the middle of nowhere. I can still see them in a moderate sized town in the UK.

No these are just annoying drifting dots. You can't see the stars because light pollution has been growing exponentially since we figured out how to make LEDs

They aren't blinking. The apparent blinks are due to intermittent, rather than continuous exposure. The gaps you're seeing are where the satellites were when the camera wasn't capturing.

What's really happening here is that they've used a post processing method specifically designed to highlight the satellites rather than the comet. This method would have rejected the satellites.

The post says it's the reflecting sunlight at dawn/dusk. Just need to read beyond the headline.

Almost all, if not every satellite is going to be reflection. And it's going to be significantly worse at sunset and dawn since that's when the satellite is still in the sun but the ground is dark. That just happens to be when comets are typically most visible.

May be an artifact of stacking. Each line in the segment could be a single long exposure.

The light tends to be reflected light off solar panels. Sometimes, as the satellite moves the light doesn't reflect at you.

This is from stacking dozens of exposures and not rejecting out the trails. The satellite still moves for the few seconds between each exposure, creating the gaps

Multiple exposures stacked together? The dark spots could be the brief time between exposures.

Probably satellite rotation making them "blink"