What I want to know is why astronomers are bitching about Starlink instead of capitalizing on the vastly reduced launch costs it brought about. Falcon 9 has been launching satellites for anyone who asks for a decade now. Where is Harvard’s space telescope? Last I heard they have a 50 billion dollar endowment. They could easily splash out on a space telescope for a fraction of that. James Webb and GAIA are amazing, but we could have a whole networked constellation of space telescopes by now if the universities had been on the ball.
An endowment isn't free money and launching a telescope into space is still a costlier venture than plopping a few down on a mountain range like Mauna Kea or the Chilean Andes. Contrary to your imagination, radio telescopes aren't cheap either. The Smithsonian and NASA fund most of the construction, operation, and maintenance of Harvard's telescopes rather than the university.
Sure, sure. The endowment generates revenue which is then spent on stuff. Harvard spends billions every year on stuff. A small slice of that spending over the last decade could have gotten them a huge scientific and prestige boon: the first major private telescope in space. (Cubesats don’t count.)
Government subsidies might explain it though. Why should Harvard spend their own money when they can spend mine?
Cubesats can’t take very good pictures. You need a big mirror to get really clear imagery and you can’t cram one of those in a cubesat. Space telescopes are by nature massive, heavy satellites unless they aren’t intended to look very far or see very much. The other option is to cheaply build something absolutely massive on Earth.
I know, that’s why I said that cubesats don’t count. There are already lots of cubesats with telescopes in orbit, but they don’t count because you couldn’t do good astronomy with them.
What you call "the endowment " doesn't exist in a monolithic sense. "The endowment" is a disparate collection of donations from alumni such as scholarships, artwork, buildings, and other gifts each of which is governed under their own specifically-worded contracts. Rare is a large gift offered to a university in cash. Rarer still would such a gift come without strings attached.
> Government subsidies might explain it though. Why should Harvard spend their own money when they can spend mine?
The government's justification has historically been that the research value gained by putting the brightest minds to work at the frontier of academic science is worth the allocation of necessary monies. Whether that is (or has been) true is obviously debatable.
I just have to say: I _hate_ with a white-hot fury the growing usage of html-load and error-report dot com bullshit on these sites. I block those domains for gratuitous ad-serving, and sites just cycle a modal error now.
(I know, I could disable JavaScript everywhere and enable it on a site-by-site basis. Maybe that time has come.)
I was living in the eastern Caribbean ten years ago (a place that is not particularly poor), and the number of web services that could not handle a slow or unreliable connection was kind of shocking. Netflix was actually pretty impressive, they were fine to about 500kb/s with a lot of dropped packets. Below that, they were slow, but by no means unreliable. Most other sites would shit the bed on a similar connection.
Starlink has been an absolute godsend for my friends that are still down there.
You mean privileged people in developed countries had it. Billions of people did not.
I’ve seen the first hand impact of starlink in communities that before had dialup as the fastest option from Australia to Tunisia to remote arctic Canada.
I have such a love hate relationship with the tech. On one hand, I live on the edge of the mountains and can get away while on-call, set up my starlink and still be within SLAs if I got paged while out of service (weekend pages are fairly rare). On the other hand, I'm an amateur astronomer, for visual astro, it's not a huge deal, but I see how it could be for astrophotography (streaks) and obviously it's a problem for radio.
I agree. Enlarging Elon Musk’s fortune is significantly more pressing than the ability to learn about the origins of the universe, or enjoying the night sky.
“Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.” --https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yeah but we're dealing with a known liar, killer of 100s of thousands of children, and a person with a weird breeding fetish. Why would one assume good faith when discussing any Elon Musk venture?
As if most people use the Internet for proper utility and not just creating and consuming outrage-bait and slop. Suddenly the cost-benefit of "internet for people on earth" seems a lot less genuine.
You need surprisingly little bandwidth to send and receive messages, make calls, and read the news.
> Algorithmic mitigation is being explored, but scientists describe it as “embryonic” — potentially demanding computing power that rivals the science processing itself.
It sounds like this would work? Just be more costly, at least in the short term.
> Engineering fixes are the real answer
What is the fix and tradeoff? The article doesn't seem to cover it at all.
While I pine for a dark sky, it makes sense that these operations should move in the same way century old optical telescopes in cities are no longer used for cutting edge science.
The far side of the moon seems like an increasingly viable option.
There's a lot fewer than 8 billion people who have access to the resource of "radio astronomy". I suspect it is in fact less than the 10 million figure of people who might want to use satellite-provided internet.
And no i don't think so. Radio astronomies research results are fundamental for all of us, our understanding and for modern technology.
This makes it nescsaary that you have to send something away out of earth. Is Spacex sponsoring this type of research? No. So who has the researcher go to? To someone with money.
People need light to see in cities. This light serves a function.
Starlink satellites are emitting unintended and useless EMR that serves no function. It is not necessary for the function of these satellites.
This is a money issue. The question you should ask is whether it will cost more for SpaceX to fix their satellites than it will to build radio telescopes (which are not small devices) in space. Personally, I suspect launching radio telescopes into space will not be the cheaper solution.
In fact it will improve the situations as all the light will be directed down, and so you'll need fewer lumens/lux/candela since half won't be waste going up (saving electricity), less glare on the roads after rain, and folks won't have street light blasting through their windows.
Instruments on the far side of the Moon will need some communication with Earth. While you can fantasize about running very long surface cables, the common solution consists of orbiting communications satellites.
There are currently at least 8 satellites orbiting the Moon. We can expect that number to increase. Also to add to the excitement, when a satellite deorbits there, it will never slow down, burn, or disintegrate. Just one big hunk of equipment impacting at full speed. Enjoy your craters.
I realize this is off topic, but why do people use Claude of all models to write these, when its style is so obvious and so grating? I just immediately hit Back on the first Claudism.
Did you care about the writing style of Rex Edison before and now you are disappointed?
That page is not the New Yorker.
And don't get me wrong, but the writing of normal newspaper became shit through the internet not due to claude. You have the clickbait header, than you have the subtext which repeats the clickbait header, then you had the first paragraph which repeats the subheader, than you had the second paragraph giving you some random 'background infos' and then you got the gist of the story in the 3 or 4th paragraph.
Clickbait headlines have a long history. Go look up old newspapermen’s reminiscences about them. The most famous are classics like “HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR” (1983) from the NY Post or “STICKS NIX HICK PIX” (1935) from Variety.
Not to mention 13 em-dashes in a 500 word post. At this point you may as well ask Claude yourself about news and cut out the middleman. That'll also cut into their attempts to manipulate your opinion.
Another example of billionaire wait trillionaire power capture. It’s really tough for democracy when one man has all that power. Hah Elon is lex luthor.
There is some evidence that little engineering effort has been put into mitigating this problem. I think if someone actually tried really hard we could make these birds a lot quieter.
> We compared the detected power flux densities of this UEMR to that emitted by the first generation v1.0 and v1.5 Starlink satellites. When correcting for the observed satellite distances, we find that the second-generation satellites emit UEMR that is up to a factor of 32 stronger compared to the first generation.
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[ 0.40 ms ] story [ 20.2 ms ] threadGovernment subsidies might explain it though. Why should Harvard spend their own money when they can spend mine?
> Government subsidies might explain it though. Why should Harvard spend their own money when they can spend mine?
The government's justification has historically been that the research value gained by putting the brightest minds to work at the frontier of academic science is worth the allocation of necessary monies. Whether that is (or has been) true is obviously debatable.
(I know, I could disable JavaScript everywhere and enable it on a site-by-site basis. Maybe that time has come.)
I was living in the eastern Caribbean ten years ago (a place that is not particularly poor), and the number of web services that could not handle a slow or unreliable connection was kind of shocking. Netflix was actually pretty impressive, they were fine to about 500kb/s with a lot of dropped packets. Below that, they were slow, but by no means unreliable. Most other sites would shit the bed on a similar connection.
Starlink has been an absolute godsend for my friends that are still down there.
I’ve seen the first hand impact of starlink in communities that before had dialup as the fastest option from Australia to Tunisia to remote arctic Canada.
Medical stuff, school, talking to loved ones.
Everyone complains about Reddit and twitter and whatever else being heavily astroturfed, but we’re supposed to think HN is somehow immune?
Everyone i know who is using starlink doesn't use starlink because htey need starlink for internet.
So is it worth it for a handfull of people on our planet vs. destroying our atmoshpere and removing access to our space?
I don't think so.
You need surprisingly little bandwidth to send and receive messages, make calls, and read the news.
Maybe Starlink can design proper filters and shielding so both Internet and astronomy can happen at the same time.
It sounds like this would work? Just be more costly, at least in the short term.
> Engineering fixes are the real answer
What is the fix and tradeoff? The article doesn't seem to cover it at all.
> The numbers tell the story bluntly:
I wouldn't waste too much compute trying to parse it, lots of LLM tells in the article. Pangram puts it at 100% AI.
The far side of the moon seems like an increasingly viable option.
Maybe even start paying for the toxic waste he is landing when his junk continuously fails to stay up and re-enters the atmosphere.
That sounds like a nice attitude from you.
And no i don't think so. Radio astronomies research results are fundamental for all of us, our understanding and for modern technology.
This makes it nescsaary that you have to send something away out of earth. Is Spacex sponsoring this type of research? No. So who has the researcher go to? To someone with money.
Starlink satellites are emitting unintended and useless EMR that serves no function. It is not necessary for the function of these satellites.
This is a money issue. The question you should ask is whether it will cost more for SpaceX to fix their satellites than it will to build radio telescopes (which are not small devices) in space. Personally, I suspect launching radio telescopes into space will not be the cheaper solution.
Street lights with (full) cutoff will still provide light for people:
* https://www.blancocountynightsky.org/guidelines.php
* https://highways.dot.gov/safety/other/visibility/fhwa-lighti...
* https://www.zgsm-china.com/blog/light-distribution-of-outdoo...
In fact it will improve the situations as all the light will be directed down, and so you'll need fewer lumens/lux/candela since half won't be waste going up (saving electricity), less glare on the roads after rain, and folks won't have street light blasting through their windows.
There are currently at least 8 satellites orbiting the Moon. We can expect that number to increase. Also to add to the excitement, when a satellite deorbits there, it will never slow down, burn, or disintegrate. Just one big hunk of equipment impacting at full speed. Enjoy your craters.
There are more peculiarities, like most orbits being long term unstable, abrasive dust, etc.
But nothing that can't be habdled with good engineering.
That page is not the New Yorker.
And don't get me wrong, but the writing of normal newspaper became shit through the internet not due to claude. You have the clickbait header, than you have the subtext which repeats the clickbait header, then you had the first paragraph which repeats the subheader, than you had the second paragraph giving you some random 'background infos' and then you got the gist of the story in the 3 or 4th paragraph.
> We compared the detected power flux densities of this UEMR to that emitted by the first generation v1.0 and v1.5 Starlink satellites. When correcting for the observed satellite distances, we find that the second-generation satellites emit UEMR that is up to a factor of 32 stronger compared to the first generation.
https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/abs/2024/09/aa51856-24/aa5...
> Current ITU regulations ignore unintended satellite hardware leakage, leaving astronomers without legal protection.
Oh, what a coincidence.