I take it you've never actually tried to commute via bus. More often than not, you're standing nose to elbow with fifty other people in a 40-person bus.

Hope you can sleep standing up.

Thanks doc!

This is essentially boiling down to the logic of mutually assured destruction. A reasonable party would rather not see his country get turned into a glass crater because he launched a first strike. But there's always the danger of some nutjob Putin or Kim who decides that having another five years in office is more important to them than the lives of every man, woman and child on earth.

Of course, what do they care? If they lose, they won't live long enough to see it, while if they win, sure the world is wrecked, but hey, they survived and kept hold of power, and that's the really important thing.

Spacex's satellites are intentionally short-lived and have a useful life of just five years. If someone went to the enormous trouble of knocking them all out, SpaceX could just launch a barebones service replacement on the next satellite full of replacements they were going to launch anyways.

Honestly, part of why I'm reluctant to commit to using Starlink is because it sounds like it has very high operating and maintenance costs for that reason. Sure, Musk has made space launches cheaper. Cheap enough to intentionally use short-lived satellites for long-term static services? I don't know....

Oh great, we can add "Intentional Kessler cascade" to our "Global Thermonuclear/biowarfare Worry sheet."

Seriously, vandalism at a planetary scale.

-Everything- affects your health long-term. Living in vancouver right now...but it's way better than Bakersfield, California where basically everyone who stays there develops lung and nasal problems. Bakersfield has this kind of fungus in the soil which isn't usually a problem....until dust storms kick it into the air, people breathe it in and develop something called valley fever. Which was killing enough people that the nearby prison had to shut down; inmates kept dropping dead.