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Please Do Not Let Elon Musk Destroy the Ozone Layer
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this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
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Have yet to see any of these 'studies' take into account and compare with natural meteorite effects, which are orders of magnitude larger than the satellites.
Are you just doing the thing where you cast doubt on journal articles because they feel wrong? You don't think humans can affect the natural environment in such a way? This sounds oddly familiar and a bit ironic for this community....
Meteors aren't made out of aluminum like satellites are btw. There will be more reasearch done and we will learn more. But for now, there's a potential issue.
https://phys.org/news/2024-06-satellite-megaconstellations-jeopardize-recovery-ozone.amp
Aluminium is an element, it's going to be present in meteors to the same extent it is on earth
That's not the comparison at all, the comparison is what the sattelites are made of (mostly aluminum) and what the meteors are made of (mostly other stuff, like earth).
Is that a thing? Meteors content matching Earths?
Meteors are leftovers of the same primordial stuff that made up earth, so a cross sample of them would largely share the same ratios as earth, minus the volatiles.
Though it looks like the community hive mind has made up its mind on this one
Logic would dictate that that is likely, though that statement itself isn't scientific. Do you have any sources to back that up? I could see a possibility where, perhaps, certain elements are more likely to coalesce into planetary bodies, and others into meteoroids. It could also depend on the location in the solar system where the formation occurred — the primordial dust cloud that made up the infant solar system, I would wager, would be far from uniform.
I did some very rough estimates and found that the amount of aluminum entering the Earth's atmosphere each year is probably between 100 and 500 tons, which would be roughly comparable to the amount coming from these LEO comm sats like Starlink.
These are just super ballpark figures, but it's in the same order of magnitude. More research is definitely necessary.