I saw the opening of *Gravity* and it was pretty terrifying, but to quote Billy Bob Thornton in *Armageddon*, it’s a big-ass sky.
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It will fall back *eventually* but can cripple very important systems for tens to hundreds of years
NASA has estimates for how long it takes for debris to come down at various heights. At 600 km (50% higher than the space station) it takes a few years, at 800 km its decades, and 1000 km and up you’re looking at centuries. An incident in Geostationary orbit could remove all the communication satellites there until we can figure out a way to clean up the debris, they all exist in a narrow ring around the equator and are not impacted by atmospheric drag.
Centuries with no chance of a space station or GPS or satellite communication networks would severely disrupt global logistics for a longgg time
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