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These kinds of caps have for years been a dampener on human flourishing. My observation has been that those in stagnation or decline tend to attach themselves t

• isatty 4mo ago
  Well, if you build too many satellites in the swarms, at some point you will lose the ability to see or go to the stars.
  • m4rtink 4mo ago
    Unless you literally make Earth be indoors like in the Blame manga megastructure, any realistic satellite or debris swarm will either be in low orbit and will relatively soon burn up or in high orbit & spread over such a big area that with well planned trajectory it will not cause you any further issues.
• gordonhart 4mo ago
  In related news, earlier this year Chile cancelled plans for a gigawatt-scale solar/wind powered hydrogen production plant nearby the ESO facility in the Atacama desert after light pollution complaints from European scientists.
• umpalumpaaa 4mo ago
  And swarms
• snovv_crash 4mo ago
  Maybe a fair allocation of sattelites would be proportional to the number of citizens with voting rights in the country. Maybe with some modifier about how impactful that voting can actually be (eg. citizen initiatives vs. just electing representatives from a preselected pool).
  • rockemsockem 4mo ago
    Starlink satellites can provide anyone with Internet.
    • Normal_gaussian 4mo ago
      Can, but won't.
  • JuniperMesos 4mo ago
    As a California resident I really don't like the idea of a legal framework that encourages more citizen initiatives. They would be used to try to prevent building more housing.
    • snovv_crash 4mo ago
      Citizen initiatives are the only thing that can cut across partisan lines and stop politics from turning into tribal warfare.
      • m4rtink 4mo ago
        Maybe fix the system so there are not just two parties & bad parties fail to be voted in?
        • snovv_crash 4mo ago
          Then you need combinatorial parties to support every possible political combination. Rather just have people vote on the policies themselves.
• Normal_gaussian 4mo ago
  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.
  • rcxdude 4mo ago
    Not to mention starlink is not a solution for internet for everyone on the planet: it cannot serve everyone in a densely populated area, no matter how many satellites they have in their constellation. It's a useful piece of infrastructure, but it's far from the panacea people seem to think it is.
    • IncreasePosts 4mo ago
      Ground based infrastructure is much easier to justify in densely populated areas. So, dense areas get ground infra, and the dispersed rural population can get satellite infra
    • fc417fc802 4mo ago
      > it cannot serve everyone in a densely populated area, I also suspect that to be the case but in order to be more objective I wonder. What's the theoretical maximum bandwidth per square meter (or other unit area) that it can deliver?
      • unusualmonkey 4mo ago
        Starlink is useful, but people often confuse coverage with capacity density. The rough hierarchy is: fixed fiber/cable > Wi-Fi > cellular > LEO satellite > traditional GEO satellite. Starlink is a huge improvement over old satellite internet, but it is still fundamentally a satellite system, not dense terrestrial infrastructure. As a rough illustration, suppose one Starlink beam covers about 63 square miles and has 6 Gbps of usable downlink. At New York City density, that footprint contains about 1.85 million people. That works out to roughly 3 kbps per person. For comparison, network planners typically budget on the order of Mbps per person to comfortably support peak demand in dense urban environments. You can improve that with more satellites, more beams, more spectrum, and better hardware. But even a 100x improvement only gets you to about 300 kbps/person. Additionally, this all adds cost... that isn't needed for the vast majority of time or space that the sattelites will be over. If the sattelites orbiting over New York also orbit over the Sahara Desert - every $ spent improving NY capacity is also improving the Sahara... but with no return. The reason fiber, cable, Wi-Fi, and cellular work so well in cities is spatial reuse. Capacity can be reused block by block, building by building, apartment by apartment, tower by tower, and access point by access point. A beam from hundreds of kilometers overhead covers a much larger area. So Starlink is excellent for rural areas, ships, aircraft, remote sites, disaster recovery, and backup connectivity. But it is not a replacement for terrestrial broadband in dense cities. It solves coverage much better than it solves urban capacity.
• toasty228 4mo ago
  > 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.
  • tekne 4mo ago
    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."
    • Peanuts99 4mo ago
      But that's just what OP is saying, you can 'refuse' to be limited to nature, but nature will have other plans for you.
      • tekne 4mo ago
        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 upon 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)
• piloto_ciego 4mo ago
  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.
  • AngryData 4mo ago
    The problem is people don't see the near future as a Star Trek utopia, they see it going more towards a dystopian landscape with handfuls of extremely wealthy elite dictating how they can live their life.
    • CookieCrisp 4mo ago
      Which would make sense if they chose strategies that might stop that from happening. Instead the ones I know refuse to even learn what AI can do and refuse to see that they're not going to slow it's adoption down by sealing themselves off. The world was already heading towards a dystopian landscape without AI. So many people on this planet live in a horrific dystopia right now, and here comes along something that might help them. Might give us what we need to stop global warming. I'd rather choose something with a 1% chance of working out than what we had before, 0%.
      • AngryData 4mo ago
        But our top 2 problems are political shenanigans and energy production. And neither are going to be solved by AI, both are made worse with AI. AI is a useful tool, but tools aren't always used to improve lives.
    • deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    • brandensilva 4mo ago
• pshirshov 4mo ago
  > we will build Sun orbital structures and swarms, Another episode of arrogant fantasy in the ponyworld.
  • SidewaysView 4mo ago
    Hear, hear! Promote this man! Shut these ridiculous baboons out of society. Take their TESCREAL libertarian nonsense with them.
• happytoexplain 4mo ago
  This is unrealistic, uncharitable, and tribalistic.
• kibwen 4mo ago
  > These kinds of 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. This kind of attitude has 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.
• JBorrow 4mo ago
  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. Why don’t “we” just build more cell towers?
  • JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
    > 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?
    • stouset 4mo ago
      Google “Kessler syndrome”.
      • JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
        I am aware of no orbital solutions for a catastrophic Kessler cascade in LEO. The only place you could engineer one is in GEO, because that’s a singular orbit, not a plane much less a volume.
        • stouset 4mo ago
          First, you never specified LEO, only “space”. Second, the situation is already so bad that current satellites in LEO already require active collision avoidance systems in order to avoid becoming sources of debris themselves. Starlink alone reports over 1,600 close encounters each week.
          • JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
            > you never specified LEO, only “space” What I said applies to space, too, outside GEO, for the number of satellites anyone is currently talking about launching. > the situation is already so bad that current satellites in LEO already require active collision avoidance systems in order to avoid becoming sources of debris themselves They require collision avoidance to avoid being lost. There is no risk of a Kessler cascade in LEO right now and nobody who can do orbital mechanics is claiming as much. We’d need millions more satellites than we have right now to start approaching the point where atmospheric clearance falls below the rate of new-debris production. And even then, you’re talking about a problem in specific orbits for months, maybe years. In the meantime, you get to allow nature to reclaim huge amounts of land from cell towers and conduit.
• matthewdgreen 4mo ago
  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.
  • verdverm 4mo ago
    What time were you there? My understanding is that around dawn/dusk, the angles cause reflection, but for most of the time they are not visible. Also, what about planes? Those also cause similar light streaks. Another understanding I currently hold is that there is already a method for removing these artifacts
    • reaperducer 4mo ago
      Also, what about planes? Those also cause similar light streaks. Watch a time-lapse animation of aircraft movement. They follow fairly precise paths, and the number of them diminishes significantly at night. In places like the ones listed above, they are uncommon at night. I've been to both. You might see one once an hour, if that.
  • phainopepla2 4mo ago
    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
  • pfisch 4mo ago
    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.
• api 4mo ago
  “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. Here’s a great podcast on the latter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn1gieFMuWI 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.
• solid_fuel 4mo ago
  > 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.
  • tekne 4mo ago
    Controversial opinion: at the time, it was. To be able to live well now with much less of that may not have been possible without the sacrifices that came before.
  • ajam1507 4mo ago
    I don't think viewing the night sky is necessary for "human flourishing"
• hombre_fatal 4mo ago
  This is a good point. 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 and creating more light or that other people are getting to tech up.
• bluegatty 4mo ago
  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.
• browningstreet 4mo ago
  The "let builders and capitalists do anything because the future will be better for it" isn't a technically considered position. It's a tautology.
• reaperducer 4mo ago
  These kinds of caps have for years been a dampener on human flourishing. 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.
  • deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
• garbagewoman 4mo ago
  Can you expand more on your plans to give Africans more access to high speed internet?