The Kessler Syndrome: Space junk in orbit

For the lower orbits I think there are some points to be made about the additional flights to maintain enough satellites, as well as the questions of what happens to all this junk as it de-orbits? If we're talking about sustainable infrastructure, what kind of new weird material/chemical build-ups are we going to be dealing with after 50 years of tens/hundreds of thousands of private satellites partially burning up and partially raining down on random spots on the planet?

Perhaps this is less of an issue than I'm imagining it will be, but I tend to think we'd be better off figuring out some kind of autonomous robot LEO satellite aggregation/recapture solution for cleaning up satellites from higher stable orbits that can operate farther and live longer. We should be allocating our launches to other projects.

Even without considering the emissions of launches, there is a significant resource energy/cost for each one and the noise pollution also takes a toll on surrounding ecosystem. If we're going to be ramping up launches to scale the mass to orbit, we're also going to be scaling those negative externalities. I think we really need to make sure the mass we're taking up is worth it and not just governed by whoever happens to have the most money to burn.

I can imagine the very near future where people are paying to launch crypto-mining satellites for memes, or some other such wasteful nonsense.

This is just like overfishing - every fisherman is motivated to catch more fish himself, rather than to leave the stock to grow, so it gets fished until the population collapses. And, they keep fishing right into the collapse, they don't even stop when their haul declines, just invest more in becoming more efficient at depleting the commons faster.

The likely result is that everyone will keep putting up satellites, making minimal safety measures for Cover-Your-Ass publicity, and then it'll cascade collapse one day soon.

No, they aren't; that's just the point. When the commons becomes unusable, nobody can exploit it any more. And if that happens quickly enough, the short term benefit of exploiting it is not sufficient to outweigh the long term cost of it becoming unusable. That seems to me to be happening in the case under discussion. And once it happens, there are only two options open: (1) figure out how to not exploit the commons, i.e., all the parties who want to use it have to come to agreement on how to use it sustainably; or (2) nobody gets to use it at all. If there are significant benefits to be gained by using the commons, as there certainly are in this case, there is a strong incentive for the parties to figure out how to do option #1 instead of just giving up and taking option #2.

> they keep fishing right into the collapse, they don't even stop when their haul declines, just invest more in becoming more efficient at depleting the commons faster.

The reason this works for overfishing (where it has indeed happened) is that fishing is not the only source of food. Once overfishing has completely depleted a fishery, people just switch to other food sources.

In this case, there is only one Earth orbital space, and it doesn't seem like there is any viable alternative to providing the kinds of services that are being provided by satellites. But if that turns out not to be the case, if some of the players are able to find alternatives, then yes, that would increase the likelihood that Earth orbital space would not be cleaned up by the individual market participants.