This is such an overly dramatic way of looking at it. Even at its most extreme Starlink will not really hurt our capacity to study our night's sky.
We are talking about a extremely tiny part of the sky that will only be visible very infrequently and the position is known at all times.
This does not impact most of astronomy at all.
Cleaning up space is not a technically impossible problem. It just has not yet been done because nobody had a need for it.
The waste majority of these satellites would fall back to earth, they can not stay 100s of years even in the worst case. Those few that do actually break and are to high up to wait out, can be collected once we have the scale of launch and service infrastructure. Until that point they would be on known location and SpaceX could make sure they don't hit anything.
It seems utterly absurd to me to ignore a massive technological leap for humanity because a tiny part of it hurts research (or is assumed to possible hurt research) and the idea that there is not enough space in orbit and that is not convincing at all.
We are talking about a extremely tiny part of the sky that will only be visible very infrequently and the position is known at all times.
This does not impact most of astronomy at all.
Cleaning up space is not a technically impossible problem. It just has not yet been done because nobody had a need for it.
The waste majority of these satellites would fall back to earth, they can not stay 100s of years even in the worst case. Those few that do actually break and are to high up to wait out, can be collected once we have the scale of launch and service infrastructure. Until that point they would be on known location and SpaceX could make sure they don't hit anything.
It seems utterly absurd to me to ignore a massive technological leap for humanity because a tiny part of it hurts research (or is assumed to possible hurt research) and the idea that there is not enough space in orbit and that is not convincing at all.