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Some things don't need ownership to be treated with respect. Animals in the jungle are not owned exclusively by anyone but we still want to collectively protect
by piva00 2y ago
Some things don't need ownership to be treated with respect. Animals in the jungle are not owned exclusively by anyone but we still want to collectively protect them.
One can try to be a good neighbour and mindful of others sharing that space (in this case, radio frequencies coming from out of Earth), or one can be an asshole and say "no one owns this, I can do whatever I want".
> I think we’ll be fine. Same as we were fine with every other thing that seemed like it was going to destroy the world.
You can't know what will be missed, it's not about "will destroy the world", it's getting noisier, we will miss signals in those frequency ranges, and for what? So you and some others can travel around connecting to the Internet and posting on Hacker News? I don't think that improves our understanding of the cosmos, while the work of the people being impacted by the radio noise actually does improve our understanding of the fucking Universe.
I think it's quite clear what is more important for humanity... But assholes don't care about that, they launch some satellites to make some money, damned be others in their way.
- jart 2y agoThe people won't have any understanding at all if they can't access Wikipedia. At this point radio astronomy has got to be hitting the long tail of scientific achievement. Unless someone can demonstrate otherwise, I'd be more concerned about the careers of the people still doing it rather than humanity's ability to understand the universe. The stars ain't going to change. Maybe you'll miss a few supernovas. If I were a radio astronomer I'd actually be rejoicing now, because this gives me a legitimate need for the budget required to build my own Hubble-like telescope, far away from Starlink.
- piva00 2y agoThat's the thing, the vast majority of people paying for Starlink's service could already access Wikipedia, Starlink is not democratising internet access in places where people never had access before, as much as that is their PR selling point. The amount of people actually getting to access Wikipedia reliably for the first time because of Starlink is a tiny, tiny fraction of all users. The pure hubris of not even communicating with the scientific community to tackle potential obstacles that could hinder their exploration is what's absolutely wrong, just a one-sided decision to fuck it up because they can. > The stars ain't going to change. Maybe you'll miss a few supernovas. If I were a radio astronomer I'd actually be rejoicing now, because this gives me a legitimate need for the budget required to build my own Hubble-like telescope, far away from Starlink. Oh, that's great, go tell that to the PhDs in radio astronomy right now that might be getting fucked in their observations while on a time crunch to get their doctorate because someone decided to turn on GHz radios in space that mess with their instruments developed through the research of thousands before them. Also tell us the taxpayers that investment in our expensive radio astronomy equipment on Earth is getting less useful because one company decided they can fuck with the spectrum they've been developed to listen to, I'm sure that the observatories on this list [0] don't really care and now are tingling with joy because they can spend even more public money to build radio telescopes but in space™. Have you ever tried to get grants to build instruments that cost 9 figures dollars, and a decade or more to be finished? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_radio_telescopes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_radio_telescopes