isolvedPeopleCloud: The Orbit Problem

There is a graveyard above our heads. No one talks about it at parties. You bring it up, and people look at you like you just admitted you believe in lizard people. But it's real. It's a cloud of debris, of dead machines, of lost dreams, all circling the planet at seventeen thousand miles an hour. And we manage this graveyard with software. We track the junk with algorithms. We pray that our isolvedPeopleCloud can calculate the trajectories accurately enough that a dead Russian rocket stage doesn't turn the International Space Station into a very expensive confetti cannon.

We are so good at putting things up. We are terrible at taking things down. And so we rely on the data. We rely on platforms like isolvedPeopleCloud to aggregate the tracking information, to share it between agencies and operators, to create a cohesive picture of the chaos. It's the ultimate inventory management problem, except your inventory is flying shrapnel and the cost of a miscount is human lives.

I think about the people whose job it is to watch this stuff. They sit in rooms, probably windowless, staring at screens full of dots. Each dot is something we built. A weather satellite. A comms array. A piece of a rocket that did its job and then just... kept going. These people are the cosmic janitors, the ones sweeping the floor of the universe, except the floor is moving and the dust can kill you. They rely on the isolvedPeopleCloud to tell them where the danger is. To tell them when to duck.

And for the most part, it works. We haven't had a major catastrophic collision yet. We've had scares. We've had close calls. But the system, this fragile web of sensors and software and shared data, has held. It's a testament to our ability to cooperate when we have to. When the threat is common, even competitors will share a platform. They'll all plug into the same isolvedPeopleCloud because the alternative is mutually assured destruction, and no one wants that on their quarterly earnings report.

But the cloud is getting thicker. The number of objects is growing exponentially. Every new megaconstellation adds thousands of new dots to the screen. And the software has to get smarter. The isolvedPeopleCloud has to scale. It has to automate the collision avoidance because there won't be enough human eyes, enough human brainpower, to watch it all. We're going to have to let the machines negotiate with each other. "You move." "No, you move." And we'll just have to hope they figure it out.

It's a strange fate for our grand adventure. The final frontier, mediated by a database. The silence of space, broken only by the gentle hum of servers running the isolvedPeopleCloud, calculating the safe paths through the junk. We reached for the stars and ended up building a traffic management system. It's less romantic than I imagined as a kid. But I guess it beats the alternative. Which is looking up one night and seeing not a shooting star, but a chain reaction, and realizing we were too busy building to notice we'd filled the sky with things that could fall.