Worrying for sure. But I doubt the current USA, along with Israel and Russia are going to be bothered about this. Everyone is launching satellites and other gear into orbit for war.
There is this mistaken idea out there that if the U.S. were to disarm, then other nations would also disarm, and the whole world would live in peace. But history tells us over and over that power abhors a vacuum, and were the U.S. to leave the world, another would take its place, probably Russia or China. If we disarmed, then another nation with arms will inevitably invade the U.S.
Fun fact: a successful invasion of the North American continent has very little to do with weaponry and more to do with logistics and projection of force across an ocean. There is only one superpower with the capabilities to do it at all.
Yes. Right now...because the U.S. had the biggest baddest military that the world had ever known. If we had not had that, someone else would have made one. It's one thing to forgo an option that does not seem viable versus expecting the same decision when it is.
If you are OK with US isolationism, then your fun fact is very salient.
If you'd like to keep the US-led coalition of mostly free countries intact, then your concept of the US military needs must include a lot more activity that just "defending from a hypothetical invasion of North America by Old World powers". Defense of allies elsewhere, keeping trade routes on the ocean open and safe.
I think the fiascos around tariffs demonstrated quite nicely why glorious autarky is no longer an option. Too much stuff is produced elsewhere, from resources to highly specialized products like icebreakers.
Since that ideal is not ever going to be a reality unless every human is dead, I'll treat that as a deflection. Having to go earn means throwing away fantasies and working with the world we actually live in to protect our actually very real families.
c) Your speech (e.g. “protect our families”) mirrors those of war mongers, what about the families who’s your bombs are pointing at?
Nobody gets to tell me to throw away my dream of a better and more humane world, and settle for one with horrors and war crimes. Us humans have multiple times in the past significantly reduced our weapons of war, we can, and should, do so again. Lets start with the missiles, and I‘m sure the interceptors will follow.
Interesting that your list omits China considering they have firm plans to launch ~41k satellites for government/commercial constellations plus ITU filings for >200k proposed satellites.
I am a science and astronomy fan, but I am sorry, in this case progress is more important. If we regret our decision, the LEOs will fall out of the sky by themselves in a few years and it will be ok.
A few years is a large knowledge gap if an asteroid is on its way to us.
Not to mention that’s not how it works. We regret burning so much fossil fuel but those who make huge profits from it prevent as much change as they can.
You can bet Amazon and SpaceX will do the same no matter how the rest of us regrets it
Some scientific endeavors can be paused and maybe later relaunched, if funding has not dried up and temporarily-worthless machinery has not been left to rot.
But stuff like mitigating the constant threat of big enough objects showing up on a collision course with earth should not be paused until those eye-catchers fall out of the sky. If there is something coming at us that can wipe out more than the stock price of one particularly space-enthusiastic company, we should like to know within a time period appropriate for our current planetary defense capabilities. Which will surely improve, over time - so maybe we can pollute the sky, later.
Is that sort of research unavoidably impaired by a more crowded night sky? Or do we just have to spend more to collect the same quality of data from more or better terrestrial observatories?
The year is 2026. Surely the orbits of all the satellites are known well enough, and optics are modelled well enough for telescopes to know which few pixels to ignore at any given moment?
Light scatters in the atmosphere, it's the same reason you can shine a laser beam and see it even though the light should be collimated. With enough sources of light, you end up with more background light pollution.
There's at least two issues with this line of thinking:
1. many astronomical observations are long integrations (many minutes of open shutter) and you often cannot read out the pixels during the exposure. So you can't selectively ignore pixels on a "by moment" basis. And with enough satellites, enough pixels could be affected to render an entire image effectively unusable
2. It seems you're thinking only about optical astronomy. There's also a ton of radio/millimeter wave astronomy that's done from the ground. Satellites have radio-wave downlinks that can be powerful enough to destroy the electronics used in radio astronomy receivers. The US's National Radio Astronomy Observatory has been working on data sharing with Starlink to mitigate this, but it's basically up to companies to agree to work together. Other satellites / companies don't engage in this coordination and so some radio telescopes need to go to a "safe"/stow position to protect the electronics. This costs valuable observing time.
How about putting our astronomy experiments into space as well? There'd be no light / em pollution there, as well as no atmospheric interference etc. and, 24/7 free power courtesy of our sun.
Id expect orbital observatories to be superior to ground based ones, thinking of Webb, Hubble.
I suppose the only downside is cost. So, the actual problem, is how to tax the shared resource that is our LEO.
Aside from that, wed also want to incentivize not leaving space debris in orbit. Require insurance, and perhaps rent for orbital trajectories?
But, without working international order, theres no way thats gonna happen...
Why not? They are massive only because you are limited by earth surface. In space there are no limits, see Radioastron for example, and that was decades ago.
Right now for the price of that one project one could have a humongous radio telescope in orbit without any interference. If only people could really look forward.
> In space there are no limits, see Radioastron for example, and that was decades ago.
Radioastron required cross-correlating the signal with ground-based radio teleacopes in order to do science. The collecting area, dish distributons, etc. would need to be fully replicated in space if one wanted to avoid using ground-based facilities entirely.
Nope. Ot was one of a kind thing only because you could not launch two at the time. With that a-given, ofc the ground-based "other end of the leg" was essential for it to work.
Now we can launch two. Or two dozen. This completely obviates any need for ground listeners as for resulting angular resolution.
Since ground-based radioastronomy has other uses, will stay there anyway and since crosscheck is always better, future long-base radiointerferometry will use legacy ground-based observatories.
> How about putting our astronomy experiments into space as well? There'd be no light / em pollution there, as well as no atmospheric interference etc.
One would need to put the telescopes into fairly high orbits in order to avoid the interference. I think that even images made with the Hubble space telescope have sometimes seen the impact of satellite constellations.
This is why we have things like NEO Surveyor planned: space-based space rock detection.
That "particularly space-enthusiastic company" is a big part of why we're in a decent place for orbital defense right now. SpaceX has a lot of launchers, and a steady enough launch cadence that they can put a payload up there really fast, if there is a reason to hurry. Before, there was a very real risk of having to wait months just to get a launcher lined up - now, that's not nearly as much of a problem.
China’s constellations are going to orbits that will take hundreds of years to return to earth and could make launching much harder if there is a collision. As far as I know only SpaceX has satellites in low orbits that frequently need propulsion to push back up, and fall back within 5 years.
OK and we aren't going to stop China from doing it. They do what they want. So there's nothing to fuss about.
This article mentions SpaceX 7 times and China once incidentally, they want to nag SpaceX into doing things that don't matter when China's launches do matter and nobody is going to nag them into decelerating.
Fun fact: SpaceX has packed some segments of LEO so densely they surpassed the local Kessler syndrome density. In other words, even if the debris deorbits by itself in LEO, you can still cram enough sats in an orbit to get a runaway chain reaction from just a single impact.
Do you ever use GPS (for navigation or time sync)? Do you ever use Starlink? Do you make use of weather forecasts? Or fly on an airliner that uses any of those three? Watch a televised program from the other side of the planet?
Yes, I can do most of the things now because enough is already up there. Can you elaborate why do you want more? Like a million more as these companies are planning?
I'm sorry but this is not a good enough argument for gutting science. You need to justify that capacity and coverage increase is required.
The companies trying to make these plans are just looking for money. It's not for some noble goal for progress. If you fail to see that, I'm sorry for you.
Connectivity for the entire globe does more for progress. Millions of people have access to the wealth of human knowledge that wouldn’t otherwise have it (Africa, rural people around the world).
Additionally, what we lose in visibility from earth we will more than gain in visibility from space telescopes, which will be funded by funds provided by LEO satellites.
Any way you slice it, it’s a massive net increase in scientific progress and quality of life for many millions of people.
It does not need to be a choice between having internet or seeing stars at night.
Also, telescopes on the ground can be made much bigger and more powerful than in space, so even if some satellite profits were somehow (magically?) directed toward space telescopes, losing the night sky would be bad for science.
>It does not need to be a choice between having internet or seeing stars at night.
It’s not, we’ll be able to see the stars no matter what. There are many millions of people who are getting real broadband access to the internet for the first time right now because of these satellites. It really does enable an entirely new way of living for people in rural areas, I see this myself firsthand every day. Many areas are just economically not feasible to run fiber cables to.
Cheap access to space means you can put space telescopes into orbits that provide views entirely unobtainable from earth. And with cheap access to space we can eventually put space telescopes which exceed the size of the largest ground telescopes which won’t have to deal with atmospheric interference or light pollution at all.
Starship will lower the cost to orbit by 15x. Making entirely new types of scientific missions economically viable including extremely large space telescopes.
Telescopes in space are extremely expensive even if the launch itself were completely costless.
A decision of whether or not to destroy the dark night sky globally should be made at a societal level beforehand. Instead the path of maximum expected profit for a few people was taken instead of carefully considering the implications, alternatives, and mitigations.
Likely because, in space, reflective items don't heat up as much from sunlight as would a dark, energy absorbing, material. Shedding heat in space is a difficult enough endeavor already without also painting your satellite black so it reflects less light (and thereby absorbs more heat).
This is a tradeoff we have to make with infrastructure and development in general. How do you balance human needs with pristine nature?
Do we put up long-distance power lines and wind farms even though they ruin the views? Do you tear down a forest to put up farmlands and suburbs? Do you build a dam to provide water for irrigation, even though it kills the fish and floods a valley?
Satellites are actually easier than most of those tradeoffs, because nothing lives in space and there's no nature to destroy. It only affects us.
The purpose of most of these satellites is internet access where we already have less limited possibilities with less maintenance costs like constant replacement
> Asteroids with a diameter more than 30–50 metres (100–150ft) are large enough to make it through our atmosphere intact, however, and the chance of this happening is estimated to be around once in every 100 years.
> The damage from an impact of this size would be wide-ranging, and could wipe out an entire city if they were to impact a heavily populated area.
We lack the technology to detect this size of asteroid with enough time to do anything about it.
Luckily, the majority of the earth's surface is unpopulated. Most of these rocks hit the ocean or Siberia and cause few or no casualties. The odds of it hitting a major city are quite low.
That "if it hits a populated area" reduces the probability by a factor 100 (because about 1% of the world's surface is urbanized [1]).
So the actual frequency of "city wiped" is more like once every 10000 years. Completely negligible compared to other city-wiping events (earthquakes or floods for example).
> These proposals, combined with others considered in the study, would dramatically brighten the night sky, hindering humankind’s ability to observe faint cosmic targets, including far-away galaxies, some Earth-like planets around other stars, and even asteroids potentially dangerous to Earth.
They won't ignore it if Americans and Europeans agree to contribute their fair share to the well-being of all the people and stop hoarding all the world's wealth to themselves. A situation where the minimum wage in some regions of the US is over $15, while in parts of India have the median wage is less than 50 cents, is an unjust absurdity.
India having a wage of 50 cent is somehow America's fault? They failed to develop their infrastructure, and as a result their economy. That's their fault, nobody else's.
Look, I'm not suggesting we do anything bad to Americans and Europeans. Just let them pay their fair share to those they've driven into poverty.
Or do you enjoy the suffering of billions of people working for less than 50 cents? Americans and Europeans only need to share with them what is let say above $5, and then we can get almost $2 for EVERY worker on Earth.
It is necessary to at least slightly limit one’s greed and show compassion to other people who are in an extremely vulnerable position.
And who decides which satellites are approved? Is there a quota per country? Per capita? If a country declines to participate, do we count their satellites?
Centralized control from a benevolent dictator sounds great as a first approximation but rarely survives diving into the details.
If the cost to orbit does get low enough as is the assumption in this article, I would be shocked if we didn't start to see amateur space based telescopes.
Light pollution from the ground is causing more impact on (naked eye / amateur telescope) star viewing than satellites. My comment is more for the niche of people who find value in purchasing satellite time, they could be pointed in the other direction.
Agreed, I think the entire issue can be resolved with more telescopes in orbit.
I can understand European Southern Observatory (ESO) being concerned about becoming obsolete, but is the astronomy community as a whole concerned about the issue?
Quoted: Hainaut explains that "satellites, illuminated by the Sun, are much brighter than distant galaxies. When a satellite crosses what we observe, it makes a bright streak on our image, zapping whatever is behind it."
It sounds like this only affects visible light telescopes.
> sounds like this only affects visible light telescopes.
Nope - it's also an issue with radio telescopes, and radio arrays such as SKA
The Starlink constellation is leaking radio interference in bands it pinky promised it wouldn't and the issue got worse with successive generations despite assurances it would be addressed.
Such leakage isn't, of course, limited to dawn / dusk - it's ever present and ongoing.
Thank you for the correction.
"An analysis of 76 million images from a prototype station for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope found Starlink satellite emissions affected up to 30% of images in some datasets" https://www.space.com/astronomy/scientists-analyze-76-millio...
30% sounds massive, but I wish they had given more detail to how much the images had been compromised.
It’s not just about where the observatories are. It’s where they want to point to. Good luck figuring out which part of the night sky isn’t important for astronomy.
I understand that, but I would expect distant LEO satellites to appear close to the horizon, such that a relatively small aperture in the orbits would allow for a large cone of clear sky near the ground.
These caps have for years been a dampener on human flourishing. My observation has been that those in stagnation or decline tend to attach themselves to these desires to hold the status quo. Anti-energy, anti-housing, anti-industry and so on because they've reached a local maxima in their ability to live and have chosen to spend their life in leisure.
But there is the rest of the world, and if I'm told that the Africans should not have access to high-speed satellite Internet[0] so that the Europeans can use one specific method of looking at the stars, I don't find that convincing. In time, as we expand, space-based observation will become fairly feasible for everyone. And the satellites we have will decay to the Earth should we fail to keep them up there.
We will build Earth orbital structures and swarms, and we will build Sun orbital structures and swarms, and we will go to the stars, and it will be better for humanity as a whole.
I think that "Africans should not have access to high-speed satellite Internet" is something you've just made up; the article you link talks about African people turning to Starlink because of local infrastructure issues, and the original article notes that the current satellite count is currently around 14k satellites. 100k is more than enough satellites to provide high-speed satellite internet globally.
The article makes mention of specific endeavours, like the night-time mirror satellites, which are particularly disruptive to astronomy, and the general risks of high numbers of satellites.
The ability to do Earth based astronomy is something that is of value to all the peoples of Earth, and is mainly funded by the western nations because of their current position as the people with more money.
> But there is the rest of the world, and if I'm told that the Africans
When the average African live like the average American we'll be truly fucked, probably even before that. We should raise the bottom for sure but we definitely need to cure the degeneracy of the top too
Technosolutionism is a cult. We either put the caps on ourself or nature will hard cap us anyways, in a much harsher way.
I'll wear the dunce hat if I have to, but I don't want to be an animal. I am one, now, but I don't have to be one. I refuse to be limited by what is "naturally" possible -- my nature is to be a being with a mind, and so the only limit I must respect is the raw laws of physics, whatever they are.
And physics lets me get a lot further than "8 billion Americans."
I suppose there's nature -- i.e. physics -- and Nature, i.e. the false god of the status quo. These are not, in fact, the same thing.
Small-n nature says (as best as I can tell) that I must obey conservation of mass and can't go faster than light -- and hence that I probably cannot, in fact, sustain a population of a 100 billion on Earth alone without significantly cutting down individual resource access.
Until very recently big-N Nature said we'd never have heavier-than-air-flight, an automatic translation program (see: plot point in A Fire in the Deep), or, before the Green Revolution, a population above a few billion -- but just as there's no fundamental physical law forbidding these things (and hence they came to pass) so there really is no fundamental physical law stopping all of current humanity from living a decent life (happy to be proved otherwise).
It may be impossible with current technology, sure, but there's no new physics required to make it possible -- the physics we have now permit it, with sufficient technology.
In fact -- interestingly enough -- before nuclear energy you'd have a far stronger point (though solar energy now means even without nuclear we can probably scrape by enough energy -- but coal does in fact have a Malthusian problem)
As a literal leftist by any reasonable metric, the recent trend towards “I wish it was 1995” and “AI is the worst” and “tech sucks now” from people I agree with on many other points frustrates me to no end.
“You guys know we could basically live in a Star Trek style utopia if we get this right, right?”
“The DATA cenTERS are STEALING the water and breaking Taleckshual ProPerty LERRS!”
Like, I thought we were for piracy, and against capital colonizing the space of creative ideas? But I guess what a lot of people were fond of was feeling important.
“We” can’t even effectively distribute food, healthcare and housing yet but yeah I’m sure capital will totally figure it out if we build enough machines that just accumulate more wealth to the richest people in history. I love cool new tech but I’m perfectly aware it will not do shit to solve any problem other than “eliminate or make labor cheaper”
I mean, there are less starving people than there were in most of the world. We've made progress. In my lifetime we've made progress! I mean, there are momentary set backs and they are egregious, I agree with that for sure, but the world is wildly better than it was in the early 90s or early 00s.
I was there (cue Elrond meme), I remember.
And god forbid you were gay back then, or had an ailment that needed some high tech treatment, or needed to talk to someone on the other side of the planet for any reason, or wanted to have access to knoeledge.
We've come so far, and the people yapping about how "everything is the worst" are reactionary. Yes there are problems, I don't want to downplay them. But largely, until very recently, things were getting better en masse and zoomed out enough in time that trend will likely continue if we don't blow it all up or do something stupid like decide that science is too scary to do.
What I mostly see in these threads is "Capitalist Realism" - people can't even imagine things turning out some way other than "capital controls everything forever."
Your response is not addressing my claims, homelessness is increasing, life expectancy is lagging poorer countries and there are still food security issues not being addressed in the richest country in history. I’m discussing material outcomes and you want to focus on social progress….which is fine I guess? Anyway I have receipts
Our world in data is neoliberal think tank supported by billionares. They got bad reputation of misrepresenting data to favor capitalism as inherently progressive.
None of the problems with building a utopia are technological, all of the problems are social and political. What the people arguing with you are telling you is that if you ignore the social and political problems, you're going to continue to create exactly the same kinds of problems that have been caused by every other attempt to solve social and political problems with technology. When you can figure out why people in the richest country on earth lack access to health care and food, neither of which are currently limited by actual abundance or availability, we can start talking about whatever other material things you think we need to live in paradise.
In Star Trek canon, humanity figured out how to live in utopia by destroying all existing power structures in a Third World War.
What is happening now is we have all our existing structure, and the existing requirement to earn money to live within this structure, and the human creative output we want in our eventual utopia is used to train automata with the express goal to replace humans in those creative endeavors, removing the ability for humans to earn money by being creative themselves.
It is not hard to see things from this perspective when a significant portion of writing is becoming obvious slop, and your liberal friends are having a hard time getting hired or landing writing deals or selling artwork. I would feel less important too; I'm already feeling this way when I review a PR with obvious LLM-generated descriptions and comments that reference the prompt.
Ideally, feeling important wouldn't be pejorative. Ideally, we'd have a way for artists to have food and shelter and continue to produce art. The hopes that AI will cause this to happen are equivalent to hoping WWIII will come along and wipe out 2/3 of humanity so we can start over with United Earth and warp drives and replicators.
> In Star Trek canon, humanity figured out how to live in utopia by destroying all existing power structures in a Third World War.
Perhaps we could try to destroy those power structures without having a giant war lol, just saying.
> What is happening now is we have all our existing structure, and the existing requirement to earn money to live within this structure, and the human creative output we want in our eventual utopia is used to train automata with the express goal to replace humans in those creative endeavors, removing the ability for humans to earn money by being creative themselves.
Right, I get the frustration, but how many "creators" were doing truly creative and expressive work writing ad copy or making up logos for shoe companies or whatever. The problem people have is capitalism, not the robots and it's short sighted of people to be angry at software tools rather than the system that has forced them to trade their time and skills for the right to exist.
I've literally lost my career before. The one thing that getting deathly ill has taught me is that "all things will come to an end." Someday, that will include me, but hopefully not today, and thanks to modern medicine, hopefully not any time soon. The idea that the only way an artist should be able to justify their right to survive is by shitting out jpgs on fiverr or whatever is as absurd as the idea that that was somehow meaningful work. If you're having a hard time getting hired, pivot. Adapt. Overcome. That's been my life for the last decade since I first got sick - and I'm not saying it's great, but you have to be able to adapt to new istuations. The world ain't going back. Do we become the Luddites and lose in the long run? Or do we "seize the means of computation and build something that strives for utopia?"
> Ideally, feeling important wouldn't be pejorative. Ideally, we'd have a way for artists to have food and shelter and continue to produce art.
I think food and shelter should be available for anyone on earth without any sort of need to justify it. But I do think that feeling really important should be a bit pejorative.
> The hopes that AI will cause this to happen are equivalent to hoping WWIII will come along and wipe out 2/3 of humanity so we can start over with United Earth and warp drives and replicators.
That's a false equivalency. Like, not even on the same planet.
> Right, I get the frustration, but how many "creators" were doing truly creative and expressive work writing ad copy or making up logos for shoe companies or whatever.
Exactly. The "creative" wankery is just people who got college degrees but don't want to work in offices and/or do things with numbers.
Sorry, jobs that are fun and desireable aren't in big supply. Do something difficult, boring, disgusting, unsexy and perhaps dangerous and you are set.
I had a career in something I loved that was "fun" and even desirable. It was great. I got sick and couldn't do it anymore. I have (begrudgingly, and at times angrily) moved on. I pivoted. I adapted. I did what I had to do to survive and moved forward. I'm not saying I want other people to have to experience that, but I'd say it's given me a sense of clarity about the world that I otherwise wouldn't have.
If you cannot be flexible and adjust under pressure you're going to have a bad time. I think that a lot of people are unwilling to accept change and move forward.
Like, you can also choose to enjoy other things. You can choose to do things that are meaningful that other people don't want to do. Or just... you know, do your own thing. Figure it out. Adapt and do something different. Keep throwing shit against the wall until some of it sticks!
> Perhaps we could try to destroy those power structures without having a giant war
The power structure is what is putting out the satellites and datacenters that you hope will bring the Star Trek utopia. Not sure you can both destroy it and reap its fruit, or that the fruit is not poisoned by the immorality and antisociality of the current power structure anyway.
>Perhaps we could try to destroy those power structures without having a giant war lol, just saying.
Does not, will not and cannot happen. Power structures are made to keep themselves alive at any cost necessary. There will be a bloodbath one way or another, and these structures will either disappear, or march ever forward towards enslaving you.
This does happen quite often actually - the logical progression from telegraph to digital Internet networks was interrupted by the invention and deployment of the analog telephone network.
IMHO even analog television and microwave oven look kinda out of place with the technology deployed at the same time.
You know what else we’re going to get before fusion? Everything. Commercially viable fusion energy is still a fantasy, essentially. Anyone who claims it’s only X years away is implicitly assuming that somehow, in those X years, we’ll find solutions to several fundamental problems that may not in fact have viable solutions.
Mm. I know a green-communist, who has yet to realise the contradiction between her love of trade unions and the environment when it presents itself in support of the famous UK coal miner's strikes.
Mine is? You don't even know me lol. But you know, good for you.
Neck beard, well maybe, I am taking the day off and I haven't shaved, though, I rarely shave anyway.
But if you think I developed these views of the world because of a lack of experience in it, you'd be wrong. I've seen life and death and many many things in between. I've written poetry and cried at sunsets. I've seen good men die and bad men win. I've seen justice too. And injustice. I've lived and struggled and fought and made art and raised a family and written code and built things and suffered and read literature in other tongues and loved and laughed and protested and been tear gassed and done things I regret and done things I've been proud of. I've seen the northern lights from the arctic in winter. I've seen salmon streams so think it looked as if you could cross them on foot. I know words in dying languages and worked to preserve them. You know nothing of me.
You think you can understand me because I yearn for a world that's not based on the transactional need to produce economically useful output. You think you can understand the totality of me because I'd like us to strive for an utopic vision of the world. You think you know me because a science fiction show gives me some hope for us building a better world? You know nothing of me.
But seriously, like, what is your optimal view of the world? What would you have if you were allowed to set policy or chart the course of human events or some other such thing?
Personally, I want to see everyone fed, sheltered, and comfortably able to spend their days doing what they want and not having to churn out crap to justify their right to survive. If you disagree with that, then that's your right, but I would be surprised if you disagreed with that.
The thing that drives me crazy about this kind of "pop Reddit leftism" is... okay I agree that a lot of things suck. So please tell me your better idea.
Universal health care? Okay, that's not a new idea, and I'm not necessarily against it. But beyond that it's like... tax the rich. Okay, then what?
You keep digging and pretty soon it turns into just ranting.
The answer, I think, is that they don't know.
Not that the left is unique here. I don't think 99% of people on the far right have any idea what they actually want either. Their positions are also basically just vibes. "Woke bad." "Masculinity good." "Trad good." blah blah. Vibes.
I think we give too much air time to critics. It's easy to criticize. It's infinitely harder to build and solve problems.
Once you ignore the complaining, criticism, and hand-wavey vibe-based nostalgia bullshit, you're left with a very quiet room.
These kinds of attitudes have for millenia been a dampener on human flourishing. My observation has been that those without empathy or foresight tend to attach themselves to these initiatives to obliterate our shared human heritage to satisfy their own ridiculous misconception of progress. Anti-intellectual, anti-curious, anti-social and so on because they've reached a local maxima in their ability to give a damn about what it means to live a good life and have chosen to spend their life in self-satisfied ignorance.
Moving all of astronomy to space based observations is entirely incompatible with the way that instruments are funded, built, and deployed. It is only valid for a set of highly specific and well funded observatories that take decades to get off the ground and can never be updated, improved, or modified to search new scientific directions.
I didn't understand what these satellites were really like until I visited Zion National Park two weeks ago. Zion is an International Dark Sky park, and so I was really looking forward to seeing the stars. Instead we sat outside and watched dozens and dozens of fast-moving stars zip around on all sorts of trajectories. I'm not saying it ruined the experience (I'm not an astronomer, and it was kind of fun.) But it really brought home how fundamentally we've changed the sky. I also hope we're able to lay enough fiber in developing countries that this many satellites don't need to stay up there forever.
I had the same experience visit Mojave National Preserve. It was very distracting while trying to stargaze. I had to stay up late to see the night sky I remember
How can anyone see what is happening in Ukraine and not realize the future is not just 1 starlink, but also a Chinese one and a Europe at a minimum. Probably many other countries will make sure to have at least a regional one as well though.
I frequently hang out in my driveway in the early evenings shooting basketball and listening to podcasts. I'll see easily several dozen satellites over the course of the hour or two that I typically stay out there. and I don't even live out in the country or anything. I think mostly people are just not aware (yet?) of how rapidly the number of satellites have grown in the last couple years.
“Anti” is a kind of super-meme that took over discourse in a lot of spheres, especially anywhere near academia, starting in the 1970s.
If I had to trace it to one source it would probably be the Club of Rome and Limits to Growth. Paul Erlich would be a close second with The Population Bomb.
This stuff sounds right because obviously you can’t have infinite growth in population or resource use on a finite planet. That means it won’t happen. The question is “how will it not happen?” The answer right now looks like “as people get wealthier they have fewer kids.” There are other possible answers like dematerialization of the economy which is also a thing.
Before the 70s this stuff would have been called far right and identified with ideologies like authoritarian eugenics and fascism. The 70s is when a lot of “volkisch” proto-fascist and crypto-fascist ideas got a lefty hippie makeover. The other big one is the idea that “natural” is inherently good.
I finally see this stuff getting some challenge from all across the political spectrum, even from the left. In previous decades you only ever saw it get challenged from the right or from what were once called libertarians.
> These kinds of caps have for years been a dampener on human flourishing.
I don't think blocking the view of the night sky is necessary for "human flourishing", actually. Your attitude reminds me of the Victorians, who saw their coal-smoke filled skies as a sign of virtuous progress.
More reasonable minds prevailed, in the end, and now most people have a more balanced view - with the understanding that progress and industry must be balanced with the ecosystem we live in and depend upon for life.
A similar thread that links your examples together is how we all want to be the last person up the ladder. The last person to move into some neighborhood or into the last apartment complex. Or into a country. The last person to have internet access. Now we want to freeze how it is. Everyone after us threatens our experience.
An American with access to good internet for decades is annoyed that their stargazing session isn't what it used to be now that the city is growing or that other people are getting to tech up.
Rubbish. Its 99% of the time people trying to make money and that's it.
As though Africans aren't interested in the stars, or climate change, or that they can't figure out fibre optics is borderline racist.
Europe - and soon the rest of us - are facing massive heat waves that are likely driven by climate change, it's a real problem.
That's 'actual science'.
By all means, build what you like, but you don't get to dump your externalizations on everyone else. There is no 'We' in your projects, you don't speak for us.
It’s a public space. No one should be able to just take it over for free. We aren’t being compensated for the pollution of our skies. And also, higher orbits require much longer for debris to fall back and burn up.
99.99% of the world would rather watch a train of Starlink satellites than some star they couldn't see anyway. Not to mention the satellites other benefits.
I really wanted to downvote this because I hate the constant EU bashing, but I just have to agree.
So we can’t see the stars from Munich anymore? Yes, that’s depressing, but we’re not trying to reduce light smog in Munich right now, are we? Because all the buildings that have been build, all the streets and trains, also make it hard to see the stars.
More light is one of the things progress has always brought, and eventually we will just have to accept that we started building in the sky, too.
Should so many large institutions taking it seriously not give you pause? Cause you to consider that perhaps they're economically viable for a reason you're unaware of? Or even that you could have a misunderstanding about the physics?
"All the large institutions are doing it" has never resulted in disaster (see the dot com bubble and the great financial crisis).
It seems preposterous that building a data center and
launching it into space would be more practical than building a data center terrestrially. Every problem gets 10 to 100 times harder (Cooling, energy, how are you going to do maintenance on the thing, it's in space?)
The only thing that's easier is you don't have to do any local community engagement.
If a grid connection is the constraint on your project, building an islanded data center with a buttload of solar and batteries seems a lot more feasible than launching it into space. Then you have the option to build a grid connection later and monitize those resourcess.
I'm not sure how exactly they are making these calculations but I just don't see it. Both Reflect and SpaceX are targeting SSO orbits where they are only reflecting for an hour or two at sunset. That isn't true of Starlink, but that constellation is already up there and if its fine right now, I don't see it getting much worse as the materials on it get refined to be less problematic.
More regulations would just have the result of cementing a monopoly for Spacex.
All satellites in LEO only show up at sunset (and sunrise): When they're away from the terminator, they're either on the sun-side, and hence you can't see them for all the blue sky around them, or the night-side, in which case you can't see them because they're not lit by the sun because the Earth is in the way.
I'm still checking the maths on how bright a million satellites in a terminator-following SSO would be. I'm getting very big numbers. But then, the (vague and aspirational) suggestions I'm seeing right now for SpaceX are in the 120 kW range, which is huge, and lining up a million of those is enough for a contiguous ring just under 10 meters wide (how much under is "just under" depends both on how efficient the PV is and how high in LEO you go).
Easy: Starlink should internalize its negative externalities. As a first pass, we can estimate how much astronomy infrastructure ($$$) is negatively impacted ($$$) by Starlink and pass those costs to them.
And new astronomy infra should obviously pay Starlink for the mitigations they put in place, right?
Maybe water rights really are the best model for this, but it’s a terrible model as demonstrated everywhere there are water rights. I’d like to think there’s a more sensible approach.
But they could. Which generally means that objections of the form "we should cut back on [activity] because it produces too much CO2" are misplaced. The only activity we need to cut back on is the extraction of geological carbon.
Perhaps we have 100 years to spread consciousness to space before civilisation is devastated by demographic collapse or nuclear war or some horrible virus or islam.
99.9% of species that have existed on earth are already extinct. Climate change happens constantly over long periods. Our CO2 emissions will be background noise on a million year timescale.
Time to ignore the whingers and the NIMBYs and colonize the universe.
>SpaceX plans to send one million more satellites into orbit, for space-based data centres, ...
I think we should wait to see how the first satellite data centre works out. It seems fairly unlikely that it could be practical. It seems kind of nuts...
>Reflect Orbital, a US start-up, aims to launch a constellation of very large mirror-like satellites to provide sunlight at night, with reflected beams that span at least five kilometres on Earth's surface.
Straight up nuts with no practical value, even if it did work out.
I can think of several practical uses. It would be very useful immediately after a disaster. Lighting up the night would make search & rescue much more effective. It would also allow for more solar power generation in an area, reducing pollution. Extra light at high latitudes in the winter would reduce seasonal depression.
Are they worth the cost/tradeoffs? I don’t know. But there is practical value to lighting up the night.
It doesn't work out anyway. If you work out how much light these satellites can reflect it is practically nothing and certainly not economically viable. The company seems to be little more than a way to extract money from fools.
Ubiquitous on-the-ground lighting is already disrupting plant, animal, and insect life cycles.
Adding a blanketing sun reflector illuminating five-plus square kilometers at a time will obliterate critical signals to everything living there, and won't do any good for the humans.
And nevrermind the astronomy.
It is an abomination and nothing but a scheme by amoral people to separate other fools from their money.
> I think we should wait to see how the first satellite data centre works out. It seems fairly unlikely that it could be practical. It seems kind of nuts...
I strongly suspect that what'll happen is SpaceX does launch satellites with onboard GPUs, so the SpaceX hypemen can go "the skeptics said it couldn't be done!" and take off before the actual, more crucial question of "does it make _financial_ sense?" is answered in the extreme negative
Indeed. Even optimistic estimates say SpaceX have to launch about 370,000 tons to LEO before they get the costs down low enough to be worth launching them on pure financial grounds.
I suspect Musk reaches pension age before that happens.
SimCity 2000 solved this problem 26 years ago: just beam the power down as a tight microwave beam. Granted, things get messy when the beam accidentally sweeps across your city, but such is the cost of progress.
Yes okay, good luck with that. The strategic importance to nations is far too high, it just means astronomy will evolve to a thing where it's done from space. But if you want to be the region where you support these ideas and undermine your own political support for national self-interest then that's your choice. Europe is overrun by these professional class types with nice ideas that are mispriorized. It's like a land of people that behave like pets lacking practical self-sufficiency.
I do not understand why the astronomers feel entitled to determine fair use of the sky. I feel like it's much easier and more reasonable to ask what the telescopes can do to mitigate the problem than to insist that others back off from use of the communal resource.
The great observatories are marvels of engineering - a focused effort on technical mitigations to the satellite problem would likely push the problem out for decades into the future.
Two possible paths forward:
1. inserting a shutter into the beam path while a satellite is transiting the field of view of the telescope, or
2. (somewhat worse from an SNR perspective) terminating an exposure right before it's corrupted by a transiting satellite and starting a new exposure once the satellite has passed.
I for one would much rather see effort put into advancing telescope design than blocking advances of our use of space!
That's an insane take. Do you actually understand what is being argued? It's an threat to ground based telescopes in the name of more slop-generating infrastructure.
I think it is dead obvious to anyone willing to be honest that the value created by more satellites absolutely dwarfs the value of ground based telescopes.
236 comments
[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadThe only modern contender, the Japanese Empire, arose partly by the encouragement of Teddy Roosevelt.
If you'd like to keep the US-led coalition of mostly free countries intact, then your concept of the US military needs must include a lot more activity that just "defending from a hypothetical invasion of North America by Old World powers". Defense of allies elsewhere, keeping trade routes on the ocean open and safe.
I think the fiascos around tariffs demonstrated quite nicely why glorious autarky is no longer an option. Too much stuff is produced elsewhere, from resources to highly specialized products like icebreakers.
b) You are allowed to set ambitious goals
c) Your speech (e.g. “protect our families”) mirrors those of war mongers, what about the families who’s your bombs are pointing at?
Nobody gets to tell me to throw away my dream of a better and more humane world, and settle for one with horrors and war crimes. Us humans have multiple times in the past significantly reduced our weapons of war, we can, and should, do so again. Lets start with the missiles, and I‘m sure the interceptors will follow.
I wish I was joking.
[0] https://www.jpost.com/defense-and-tech/article-900854
*The later you stay up the more disappear, until the middle of the night. But they're most obvious shortly after dark.
Not to mention that’s not how it works. We regret burning so much fossil fuel but those who make huge profits from it prevent as much change as they can.
You can bet Amazon and SpaceX will do the same no matter how the rest of us regrets it
But stuff like mitigating the constant threat of big enough objects showing up on a collision course with earth should not be paused until those eye-catchers fall out of the sky. If there is something coming at us that can wipe out more than the stock price of one particularly space-enthusiastic company, we should like to know within a time period appropriate for our current planetary defense capabilities. Which will surely improve, over time - so maybe we can pollute the sky, later.
1. many astronomical observations are long integrations (many minutes of open shutter) and you often cannot read out the pixels during the exposure. So you can't selectively ignore pixels on a "by moment" basis. And with enough satellites, enough pixels could be affected to render an entire image effectively unusable
2. It seems you're thinking only about optical astronomy. There's also a ton of radio/millimeter wave astronomy that's done from the ground. Satellites have radio-wave downlinks that can be powerful enough to destroy the electronics used in radio astronomy receivers. The US's National Radio Astronomy Observatory has been working on data sharing with Starlink to mitigate this, but it's basically up to companies to agree to work together. Other satellites / companies don't engage in this coordination and so some radio telescopes need to go to a "safe"/stow position to protect the electronics. This costs valuable observing time.
I suppose the only downside is cost. So, the actual problem, is how to tax the shared resource that is our LEO. Aside from that, wed also want to incentivize not leaving space debris in orbit. Require insurance, and perhaps rent for orbital trajectories?
But, without working international order, theres no way thats gonna happen...
Right now for the price of that one project one could have a humongous radio telescope in orbit without any interference. If only people could really look forward.
Radioastron required cross-correlating the signal with ground-based radio teleacopes in order to do science. The collecting area, dish distributons, etc. would need to be fully replicated in space if one wanted to avoid using ground-based facilities entirely.
Now we can launch two. Or two dozen. This completely obviates any need for ground listeners as for resulting angular resolution.
Since ground-based radioastronomy has other uses, will stay there anyway and since crosscheck is always better, future long-base radiointerferometry will use legacy ground-based observatories.
One would need to put the telescopes into fairly high orbits in order to avoid the interference. I think that even images made with the Hubble space telescope have sometimes seen the impact of satellite constellations.
That "particularly space-enthusiastic company" is a big part of why we're in a decent place for orbital defense right now. SpaceX has a lot of launchers, and a steady enough launch cadence that they can put a payload up there really fast, if there is a reason to hurry. Before, there was a very real risk of having to wait months just to get a launcher lined up - now, that's not nearly as much of a problem.
This article mentions SpaceX 7 times and China once incidentally, they want to nag SpaceX into doing things that don't matter when China's launches do matter and nobody is going to nag them into decelerating.
https://conference.sdo.esoc.esa.int/proceedings/sdc9/paper/3...
When is it enough?
The companies trying to make these plans are just looking for money. It's not for some noble goal for progress. If you fail to see that, I'm sorry for you.
This ain't progress it is an indictment of man's stupidity.
Additionally, what we lose in visibility from earth we will more than gain in visibility from space telescopes, which will be funded by funds provided by LEO satellites.
Any way you slice it, it’s a massive net increase in scientific progress and quality of life for many millions of people.
Also, telescopes on the ground can be made much bigger and more powerful than in space, so even if some satellite profits were somehow (magically?) directed toward space telescopes, losing the night sky would be bad for science.
It’s not, we’ll be able to see the stars no matter what. There are many millions of people who are getting real broadband access to the internet for the first time right now because of these satellites. It really does enable an entirely new way of living for people in rural areas, I see this myself firsthand every day. Many areas are just economically not feasible to run fiber cables to.
Cheap access to space means you can put space telescopes into orbits that provide views entirely unobtainable from earth. And with cheap access to space we can eventually put space telescopes which exceed the size of the largest ground telescopes which won’t have to deal with atmospheric interference or light pollution at all.
Starship will lower the cost to orbit by 15x. Making entirely new types of scientific missions economically viable including extremely large space telescopes.
A decision of whether or not to destroy the dark night sky globally should be made at a societal level beforehand. Instead the path of maximum expected profit for a few people was taken instead of carefully considering the implications, alternatives, and mitigations.
Do we put up long-distance power lines and wind farms even though they ruin the views? Do you tear down a forest to put up farmlands and suburbs? Do you build a dam to provide water for irrigation, even though it kills the fish and floods a valley?
Satellites are actually easier than most of those tradeoffs, because nothing lives in space and there's no nature to destroy. It only affects us.
The purpose of most of these satellites is internet access where we already have less limited possibilities with less maintenance costs like constant replacement
And asteroids are an extremely rare threat in the first place. It's literally a once-in-a-million-years kind of event.
City killers? That size hits more often
> Asteroids with a diameter more than 30–50 metres (100–150ft) are large enough to make it through our atmosphere intact, however, and the chance of this happening is estimated to be around once in every 100 years.
> The damage from an impact of this size would be wide-ranging, and could wipe out an entire city if they were to impact a heavily populated area.
https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/chances-ast...
Luckily, the majority of the earth's surface is unpopulated. Most of these rocks hit the ocean or Siberia and cause few or no casualties. The odds of it hitting a major city are quite low.
So the actual frequency of "city wiped" is more like once every 10000 years. Completely negligible compared to other city-wiping events (earthquakes or floods for example).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_land_use_for_food_...
The more risks the more likely one of them will hit you.
Source?
The article
How about we set a limit on how many satellites? That’s exactly how to balance
A scientific justification is the balancing mechanism that produces the number which is then enforced.
And how do you enforce it? It's not like you can just go up there an repo the satellites.
Or do you enjoy the suffering of billions of people working for less than 50 cents? Americans and Europeans only need to share with them what is let say above $5, and then we can get almost $2 for EVERY worker on Earth.
It is necessary to at least slightly limit one’s greed and show compassion to other people who are in an extremely vulnerable position.
Answer was: automobile.
Centralized control from a benevolent dictator sounds great as a first approximation but rarely survives diving into the details.
I can understand European Southern Observatory (ESO) being concerned about becoming obsolete, but is the astronomy community as a whole concerned about the issue?
I understand there's currently around 722 observatories (some defunct, some are in orbit) based on this source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronomical_observato...
But perhaps there are others I am unaware of.
Quoted: Hainaut explains that "satellites, illuminated by the Sun, are much brighter than distant galaxies. When a satellite crosses what we observe, it makes a bright streak on our image, zapping whatever is behind it."
It sounds like this only affects visible light telescopes.
Nope - it's also an issue with radio telescopes, and radio arrays such as SKA
The Starlink constellation is leaking radio interference in bands it pinky promised it wouldn't and the issue got worse with successive generations despite assurances it would be addressed.
Such leakage isn't, of course, limited to dawn / dusk - it's ever present and ongoing.
30% sounds massive, but I wish they had given more detail to how much the images had been compromised.
Space-based and ground-based telescopes are complementary to each other. You can't replace one out for the other.
But there is the rest of the world, and if I'm told that the Africans should not have access to high-speed satellite Internet[0] so that the Europeans can use one specific method of looking at the stars, I don't find that convincing. In time, as we expand, space-based observation will become fairly feasible for everyone. And the satellites we have will decay to the Earth should we fail to keep them up there.
We will build Earth orbital structures and swarms, and we will build Sun orbital structures and swarms, and we will go to the stars, and it will be better for humanity as a whole.
0: https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2026/07/02/...
The article makes mention of specific endeavours, like the night-time mirror satellites, which are particularly disruptive to astronomy, and the general risks of high numbers of satellites.
The ability to do Earth based astronomy is something that is of value to all the peoples of Earth, and is mainly funded by the western nations because of their current position as the people with more money.
(that we currently have no way to remove)
is actually 32,000 not just 14,000
what we need is the investment for "space roombas" that go around bumping things out of orbit that are dead or did not de-orbit properly
the problem is all that atmospheric burnup creates a lot of toxic pollution
Nature takes care of this for us in LEO. I’ve seen no serious plans to put millions of anything anywhere else.
When the average African live like the average American we'll be truly fucked, probably even before that. We should raise the bottom for sure but we definitely need to cure the degeneracy of the top too
Technosolutionism is a cult. We either put the caps on ourself or nature will hard cap us anyways, in a much harsher way.
And physics lets me get a lot further than "8 billion Americans."
Small-n nature says (as best as I can tell) that I must obey conservation of mass and can't go faster than light -- and hence that I probably cannot, in fact, sustain a population of a 100 billion on Earth alone without significantly cutting down individual resource access.
Until very recently big-N Nature said we'd never have heavier-than-air-flight, an automatic translation program (see: plot point in A Fire in the Deep), or, before the Green Revolution, a population above a few billion -- but just as there's no fundamental physical law forbidding these things (and hence they came to pass) so there really is no fundamental physical law stopping all of current humanity from living a decent life (happy to be proved otherwise).
It may be impossible with current technology, sure, but there's no new physics required to make it possible -- the physics we have now permit it, with sufficient technology.
In fact -- interestingly enough -- before nuclear energy you'd have a far stronger point (though solar energy now means even without nuclear we can probably scrape by enough energy -- but coal does in fact have a Malthusian problem)
“You guys know we could basically live in a Star Trek style utopia if we get this right, right?”
“The DATA cenTERS are STEALING the water and breaking Taleckshual ProPerty LERRS!”
Like, I thought we were for piracy, and against capital colonizing the space of creative ideas? But I guess what a lot of people were fond of was feeling important.
I was there (cue Elrond meme), I remember.
And god forbid you were gay back then, or had an ailment that needed some high tech treatment, or needed to talk to someone on the other side of the planet for any reason, or wanted to have access to knoeledge.
We've come so far, and the people yapping about how "everything is the worst" are reactionary. Yes there are problems, I don't want to downplay them. But largely, until very recently, things were getting better en masse and zoomed out enough in time that trend will likely continue if we don't blow it all up or do something stupid like decide that science is too scary to do.
What I mostly see in these threads is "Capitalist Realism" - people can't even imagine things turning out some way other than "capital controls everything forever."
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-lif...
https://www.unc.edu/discover/u-s-life-expectancy-drop-caused...
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
https://www.security.org/resources/homeless-statistics/
US got problems.
World's much bigger than the US, and is getting better:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy?time=1770...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/prevalence-of-undernouris...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-population-living-i...
How so?
What is happening now is we have all our existing structure, and the existing requirement to earn money to live within this structure, and the human creative output we want in our eventual utopia is used to train automata with the express goal to replace humans in those creative endeavors, removing the ability for humans to earn money by being creative themselves.
It is not hard to see things from this perspective when a significant portion of writing is becoming obvious slop, and your liberal friends are having a hard time getting hired or landing writing deals or selling artwork. I would feel less important too; I'm already feeling this way when I review a PR with obvious LLM-generated descriptions and comments that reference the prompt.
Ideally, feeling important wouldn't be pejorative. Ideally, we'd have a way for artists to have food and shelter and continue to produce art. The hopes that AI will cause this to happen are equivalent to hoping WWIII will come along and wipe out 2/3 of humanity so we can start over with United Earth and warp drives and replicators.
Perhaps we could try to destroy those power structures without having a giant war lol, just saying.
> What is happening now is we have all our existing structure, and the existing requirement to earn money to live within this structure, and the human creative output we want in our eventual utopia is used to train automata with the express goal to replace humans in those creative endeavors, removing the ability for humans to earn money by being creative themselves.
Right, I get the frustration, but how many "creators" were doing truly creative and expressive work writing ad copy or making up logos for shoe companies or whatever. The problem people have is capitalism, not the robots and it's short sighted of people to be angry at software tools rather than the system that has forced them to trade their time and skills for the right to exist.
I've literally lost my career before. The one thing that getting deathly ill has taught me is that "all things will come to an end." Someday, that will include me, but hopefully not today, and thanks to modern medicine, hopefully not any time soon. The idea that the only way an artist should be able to justify their right to survive is by shitting out jpgs on fiverr or whatever is as absurd as the idea that that was somehow meaningful work. If you're having a hard time getting hired, pivot. Adapt. Overcome. That's been my life for the last decade since I first got sick - and I'm not saying it's great, but you have to be able to adapt to new istuations. The world ain't going back. Do we become the Luddites and lose in the long run? Or do we "seize the means of computation and build something that strives for utopia?"
> Ideally, feeling important wouldn't be pejorative. Ideally, we'd have a way for artists to have food and shelter and continue to produce art.
I think food and shelter should be available for anyone on earth without any sort of need to justify it. But I do think that feeling really important should be a bit pejorative.
> The hopes that AI will cause this to happen are equivalent to hoping WWIII will come along and wipe out 2/3 of humanity so we can start over with United Earth and warp drives and replicators.
That's a false equivalency. Like, not even on the same planet.
Exactly. The "creative" wankery is just people who got college degrees but don't want to work in offices and/or do things with numbers.
Sorry, jobs that are fun and desireable aren't in big supply. Do something difficult, boring, disgusting, unsexy and perhaps dangerous and you are set.
I had a career in something I loved that was "fun" and even desirable. It was great. I got sick and couldn't do it anymore. I have (begrudgingly, and at times angrily) moved on. I pivoted. I adapted. I did what I had to do to survive and moved forward. I'm not saying I want other people to have to experience that, but I'd say it's given me a sense of clarity about the world that I otherwise wouldn't have.
If you cannot be flexible and adjust under pressure you're going to have a bad time. I think that a lot of people are unwilling to accept change and move forward.
Like, you can also choose to enjoy other things. You can choose to do things that are meaningful that other people don't want to do. Or just... you know, do your own thing. Figure it out. Adapt and do something different. Keep throwing shit against the wall until some of it sticks!
The power structure is what is putting out the satellites and datacenters that you hope will bring the Star Trek utopia. Not sure you can both destroy it and reap its fruit, or that the fruit is not poisoned by the immorality and antisociality of the current power structure anyway.
Does not, will not and cannot happen. Power structures are made to keep themselves alive at any cost necessary. There will be a bloodbath one way or another, and these structures will either disappear, or march ever forward towards enslaving you.
IMHO even analog television and microwave oven look kinda out of place with the technology deployed at the same time.
Kill. All. Trekkies. Now!
Neck beard, well maybe, I am taking the day off and I haven't shaved, though, I rarely shave anyway.
But if you think I developed these views of the world because of a lack of experience in it, you'd be wrong. I've seen life and death and many many things in between. I've written poetry and cried at sunsets. I've seen good men die and bad men win. I've seen justice too. And injustice. I've lived and struggled and fought and made art and raised a family and written code and built things and suffered and read literature in other tongues and loved and laughed and protested and been tear gassed and done things I regret and done things I've been proud of. I've seen the northern lights from the arctic in winter. I've seen salmon streams so think it looked as if you could cross them on foot. I know words in dying languages and worked to preserve them. You know nothing of me.
You think you can understand me because I yearn for a world that's not based on the transactional need to produce economically useful output. You think you can understand the totality of me because I'd like us to strive for an utopic vision of the world. You think you know me because a science fiction show gives me some hope for us building a better world? You know nothing of me.
But seriously, like, what is your optimal view of the world? What would you have if you were allowed to set policy or chart the course of human events or some other such thing?
Personally, I want to see everyone fed, sheltered, and comfortably able to spend their days doing what they want and not having to churn out crap to justify their right to survive. If you disagree with that, then that's your right, but I would be surprised if you disagreed with that.
(God, the fedora.)
Universal health care? Okay, that's not a new idea, and I'm not necessarily against it. But beyond that it's like... tax the rich. Okay, then what?
You keep digging and pretty soon it turns into just ranting.
The answer, I think, is that they don't know.
Not that the left is unique here. I don't think 99% of people on the far right have any idea what they actually want either. Their positions are also basically just vibes. "Woke bad." "Masculinity good." "Trad good." blah blah. Vibes.
I think we give too much air time to critics. It's easy to criticize. It's infinitely harder to build and solve problems.
Once you ignore the complaining, criticism, and hand-wavey vibe-based nostalgia bullshit, you're left with a very quiet room.
Another episode of arrogant fantasy in the ponyworld.
Shut these ridiculous baboons out of society. Take their TESCREAL libertarian nonsense with them.
Why don’t “we” just build more cell towers?
Why is littering our landscape with cell towers and power and fiber lines inherently better than putting this stuff in space?
I frequently hang out in my driveway in the early evenings shooting basketball and listening to podcasts. I'll see easily several dozen satellites over the course of the hour or two that I typically stay out there. and I don't even live out in the country or anything. I think mostly people are just not aware (yet?) of how rapidly the number of satellites have grown in the last couple years.
If I had to trace it to one source it would probably be the Club of Rome and Limits to Growth. Paul Erlich would be a close second with The Population Bomb.
Here’s a great podcast on the latter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn1gieFMuWI
This stuff sounds right because obviously you can’t have infinite growth in population or resource use on a finite planet. That means it won’t happen. The question is “how will it not happen?” The answer right now looks like “as people get wealthier they have fewer kids.” There are other possible answers like dematerialization of the economy which is also a thing.
Before the 70s this stuff would have been called far right and identified with ideologies like authoritarian eugenics and fascism. The 70s is when a lot of “volkisch” proto-fascist and crypto-fascist ideas got a lefty hippie makeover. The other big one is the idea that “natural” is inherently good.
I finally see this stuff getting some challenge from all across the political spectrum, even from the left. In previous decades you only ever saw it get challenged from the right or from what were once called libertarians.
I don't think blocking the view of the night sky is necessary for "human flourishing", actually. Your attitude reminds me of the Victorians, who saw their coal-smoke filled skies as a sign of virtuous progress.
More reasonable minds prevailed, in the end, and now most people have a more balanced view - with the understanding that progress and industry must be balanced with the ecosystem we live in and depend upon for life.
To be able to live well now with much less of that may not have been possible without the sacrifices that came before.
A similar thread that links your examples together is how we all want to be the last person up the ladder. The last person to move into some neighborhood or into the last apartment complex. Or into a country. The last person to have internet access. Now we want to freeze how it is. Everyone after us threatens our experience.
An American with access to good internet for decades is annoyed that their stargazing session isn't what it used to be now that the city is growing or that other people are getting to tech up.
As though Africans aren't interested in the stars, or climate change, or that they can't figure out fibre optics is borderline racist.
Europe - and soon the rest of us - are facing massive heat waves that are likely driven by climate change, it's a real problem.
That's 'actual science'.
By all means, build what you like, but you don't get to dump your externalizations on everyone else. There is no 'We' in your projects, you don't speak for us.
I am a human being. I flourish when I can see the planets and stars.
The utopia you describe sounds more like technological fetishism that benefits a select few, not the entirety of humanity.
So we can’t see the stars from Munich anymore? Yes, that’s depressing, but we’re not trying to reduce light smog in Munich right now, are we? Because all the buildings that have been build, all the streets and trains, also make it hard to see the stars.
More light is one of the things progress has always brought, and eventually we will just have to accept that we started building in the sky, too.
We are?
Bavarian Regulation on Light Pollution, Federal Nature Conservation Act, etc
Municipal lighting is regulated with light pollution in mind and allegedly you get fined over bright commercial lights at night
https://satellitemap.space
there are already several starlink competitors and even other countries planning to launch their own 1000-10,000 node networks
It seems preposterous that building a data center and
launching it into space would be more practical than building a data center terrestrially. Every problem gets 10 to 100 times harder (Cooling, energy, how are you going to do maintenance on the thing, it's in space?)
The only thing that's easier is you don't have to do any local community engagement.
If a grid connection is the constraint on your project, building an islanded data center with a buttload of solar and batteries seems a lot more feasible than launching it into space. Then you have the option to build a grid connection later and monitize those resourcess.
More regulations would just have the result of cementing a monopoly for Spacex.
I'm still checking the maths on how bright a million satellites in a terminator-following SSO would be. I'm getting very big numbers. But then, the (vague and aspirational) suggestions I'm seeing right now for SpaceX are in the 120 kW range, which is huge, and lining up a million of those is enough for a contiguous ring just under 10 meters wide (how much under is "just under" depends both on how efficient the PV is and how high in LEO you go).
A lot of astronomers disagree.
How can this be resolved?
Maybe water rights really are the best model for this, but it’s a terrible model as demonstrated everywhere there are water rights. I’d like to think there’s a more sensible approach.
I recall around SpaceX 100th landing, that a day of just transatlantic flights was more than everything SpaceX had done to that point
And in all cases, if you produce the fuel using renewables then the CO2 output is trivially brought near zero.
But...they don't.
99.9% of species that have existed on earth are already extinct. Climate change happens constantly over long periods. Our CO2 emissions will be background noise on a million year timescale.
Time to ignore the whingers and the NIMBYs and colonize the universe.
I think we should wait to see how the first satellite data centre works out. It seems fairly unlikely that it could be practical. It seems kind of nuts...
>Reflect Orbital, a US start-up, aims to launch a constellation of very large mirror-like satellites to provide sunlight at night, with reflected beams that span at least five kilometres on Earth's surface.
Straight up nuts with no practical value, even if it did work out.
Are they worth the cost/tradeoffs? I don’t know. But there is practical value to lighting up the night.
No. Lighting up the night is an abomination. Reflect Orbital can go fuck themselves.
Hell NO!!
Ubiquitous on-the-ground lighting is already disrupting plant, animal, and insect life cycles.
Adding a blanketing sun reflector illuminating five-plus square kilometers at a time will obliterate critical signals to everything living there, and won't do any good for the humans.
And nevrermind the astronomy.
It is an abomination and nothing but a scheme by amoral people to separate other fools from their money.
I strongly suspect that what'll happen is SpaceX does launch satellites with onboard GPUs, so the SpaceX hypemen can go "the skeptics said it couldn't be done!" and take off before the actual, more crucial question of "does it make _financial_ sense?" is answered in the extreme negative
I suspect Musk reaches pension age before that happens.
The great observatories are marvels of engineering - a focused effort on technical mitigations to the satellite problem would likely push the problem out for decades into the future.
Two possible paths forward: 1. inserting a shutter into the beam path while a satellite is transiting the field of view of the telescope, or 2. (somewhat worse from an SNR perspective) terminating an exposure right before it's corrupted by a transiting satellite and starting a new exposure once the satellite has passed.
I for one would much rather see effort put into advancing telescope design than blocking advances of our use of space!