GreyEyedGhost

That’s a great point, and has almost nothing to do with Kessler Syndrome. But what can I say? I live near a city where the leaders of a few nations decided it would be fun to test the effects of fallout by releasing radioactive dust over it. Aluminum oxide is pretty benign, comparatively.

Certainly, the consequences of our actions need to be considered, but let’s stick to the legitimate ones, such as what you listed, and not the highly improbable ones such as Kessler Syndrome.

Debris from a collision can be flung in all directions, including higher orbits.

Possible, but not at all likely. The joy of orbits are they’re pretty predictable because after the energy is applied the object just keeps following a path. To get a higher circular orbit would require deceleration at the right point to stabilize it. If this doesn’t happen, and it doesn’t in a collision, you will have a new orbit that will more or less pass through the altitude of the impact. So while it may have a higher apogee, it will have a lower perigee, which means it will suffer more drag due to more atmosphere. So the vast majority of debris from the collision of a LEO satellite collision will naturally deorbit, possibly faster than if the satellite hadn’t just become inert in its orbit.

The low orbits that need to be constantly maintained or they naturally deorbit are the exact opposite of Kessler Syndrome. If every Starlink satellite was to disintegrate right now, the majority of the debris would be gone in 5 years.

So, “nuclear test und an uninhibited island” next?

Un inhabited?

Edit: apparently you can’t have partial words italicized.

A single point of data rarely answers the question unless you’re looking for absolutes. “Will zipping 10 files individually be smaller than zipping them into a single file?” Sure, easy enough to do it once. Now, what kind of data are we talking about? How big, and how random, is the data in those files? Does it get better with more files, or is the a sweet spot where it’s better, but it’s worse if you use too few files, or too many? I don’t think you could test for those scenarios very quickly, and they all fall under the original question. OTOH, someone who has studied the subject could probably give you an answer easily enough in just a few minutes. Or he could have tried a web search and find the answer, which pretty much comes down to, “It depends which compression system you use.”