Technology

I remember just 10 years ago using a special app on my phone to alert me of any potential satellite flares so I could run out and catch them.

Now I can't look at the night sky for 2 minutes without seeing one.

It would be better to support public fiber infrastructure (through PUDs) in almost every way. I know not all remote areas can be reached with fiber, but most rural areas can be. My county has done exactly that with the rural portions - they focused on rolling it out to underserved rural areas first (even though it was more expensive to do that up front). Now, those rural areas have gigabit fiber and they didn't have to pay tens of thousands to wire it up to their homes.

Geo could do the job at a fraction of the environmental cost.

Latency would be a bit higher but that doesn't matter for download.

Any way to help them do that?

Polluting atmosphere doing so.

Don't count on it. These things don't just zip along in their orbits. LEO is crowded. They have to maneuver to avoid collisions... a lot.

Over the past six months, Starlink satellites have been increasingly performing collision avoidance maneuvers. According to a report filed by SpaceX with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), SpaceX broadband satellites were forced to avoid more than 25 thousand times from December 1, 2022 to May 31, 2023. And since their launch in 2019, the total number of maneuvers has reached 50 thousand.

If Starlink or any other mega-constellation company loses control of their satellites for any reason, there could be collisions. A recent study (Note: PDF) suggests that a sufficiently powerful CME could cause a runaway Kessler Syndrome in as little as 2.8 days if the loss of control lasts that long.

Ads on the fucking moon are going to do it for me.

We're just a few millimeters away from revoking that agreement though. There's not that many of them.

I dunno, every engineer not working on space almost certainly ends up optimizing some sort of ad delivery system. The tech industry is almost completely enshittified.

This isn't really space science related, just commercialization. And about focusing on Earth: we should let scientists work on what they're passionate about, IMO they'll be more motivated to research their field of choice

But there will be more satellites, and not just from SpaceX. They are already disturbing astronomers work, and it will only get worse.

There was no real debate about whether the world population is ok with it. Big corp has money, big corp acts for its interest and nothing else.

And I'm not denying the benefits of low-orbit satellites and having vast but lowly populated areas at last getting access to a fast Internet. I'm jùst pointing out that this whole thing is happening mostly out of control (or very very few control).

If you add that now international laws was shot and its body discarded in the toilet, also note that getting too much dependent on these satellites makes you very vulnerable to a military strike. I have no doubt that Russia, China and other countries (Iran?) are actively working on satellites destruction, with or without creating debris and giving us a Kessler syndrom. If you look at climate change, on-going life mass extinction, water scarcity, etc. there is little doubt that world leaders will make the worst possible decisions in the name of pragmatism (or religion, but it doesn't really matter).

I thought they couldn't take the sky from me!

is already so bad. i do astro timelapses and it's all you see anymore. they stand out so much now, if the quantity gets 100x'd it'll be a nightmare.

it will blot out the stars...

There aren’t many animals or insects in low-earth orbit though, thankfully.