The column of sky where everything lives

Consider a family on a farm whose internet arrives from 480 km up, a crew asleep at 400 km, and a weather model fed from 800 km by satellites launched before that family's children were born. Same thin column of sky — different floors of it.

In plain terms: blue floors clean up after you — thin air flushes mistakes in months to years. Amber floors keep your mistakes for decades to centuries. But some of the blue is not physics — it is effort: thousands of dodges a day. Flip the switch and watch which floors stay calm on physics alone, and which were calm only because everyone kept steering.

calm (thin air, or effort — flip to find out which) keeps its mistakes / past threshold receptor — inherits from above

Earth

AS FILED · CLAIMED The official voice: every satellite in the filed queue is claimed maneuverable, with autonomous collision avoidance and a lifetime collision probability below 0.001 per craft; the new entrants commit to full demisability on reentry. The flip you just made is the world where those promises stop being kept — the filings say it never comes. Our bands assume it sometimes does. Sources: the filings (primary), paper §7.4.

Starlink's share — five honest measuring sticks:

MEASURED Floor populations and residents: the study's stakes table, from the public catalog (15 Jul 2026, 32,010 objects, parse independently verified); resident counts are status-blind (retired generations included — that is the point). Crowding meters: mean tracked density per floor, log scale. Decay clocks are qualitative classes (months / years / decades / centuries), ASSUMED-class interpolation of the paper's §3 sourcing. The switches (master, and one per floor) swap a floor to the engine's no-maneuver counterfactual MODELED · F15: percentages are parameter belief over assumed knobs, f_imp-conditional, never event odds; a per-floor flip shows that band's own no-dodging statistic — cross-floor debris exchange is not in these per-band numbers (the receptor inherits regardless). Engine bands are coarser than floors — the three sub-465 floors share the 150–465 band statistics (stated in each card). Sources: kessler_stakes_table_v1.json · n_h_v1.csv · qb_engine_results.json · starlink_incidence_bases_v1.json; if a number here and a number in those files disagree, the files win.

In the paper: §2.2–2.3 · §3 · §4.2 (criticality by band) · §4.3 (the no-maneuver counterfactual)