Thank you for this excellent post. I listened to a related podcast recently. This is a very serious issue. Outside the dangers of falling pieces and potential damages to satellites, there is also the possibility to get "trapped on earth". There very frequent (hundreds daily) collisions between debris and even with satellites and these collisions create more debris. If we were to continue increasing the number of objects in orbit, we would get to a point where they would create a very tight net around the globe preventing to get through it, thus trapping us on the planet.