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.
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.
>the constant threat of big enough objects showing up on a collision course with earth
I don't really think this is a serious risk. This is a once-in-a-million-years kind of event.
Also, asteroid detection is not seriously affected by satellites. We can easily tell the difference between a moving satellite and a moving asteroid because of their speed.
> I don't really think this is a serious risk. This is a once-in-a-million-years kind of event.
Perhaps the last event was one million years ago and we are now (proverbially) 'due'.
> The gambler's fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy or the fallacy of the maturity of chances, is the belief that an independent and equally probable outcome which happened less frequently than expected is more likely to happen in the future (or vice versa).
We might have even seen the Chelyabinsk one coming, with current tech.. if only it had been coming at us from a slightly less bright direction. That one was probably in the once-in-a-hundred-years category.
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?
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.
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
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 close to 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).
Regardless of if they're all in one orbit or spread over in multiple orbits at different shells that are all terminator-following SSO, from the ground you're getting a train of things with somewhat higher brightness than the ISS, with a fairly small apparent separation that (I tentatively think) becomes less than your eyes can resolve at at least one point in the sky (if there's say 50 shells, where those 50 get close to crossing).
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.
> 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.
>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.
There are many feasibility and safety issues associated with the Reflect Orbital plan. It doesn’t make as much sense as you might think. For instance, the satellites can only illuminate areas a relatively short time after local sunset. The Sun reflection could potentially damage an amateur astronomer’s eye if one of the satellites crosses their telescope’s field of view:
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/true-cost-solar-powe...
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The article doesn’t consider that in a world with a million satellites in orbit, launching space-based telescopes—including into deep space—becomes an order of magnitude cheaper.
Does it? My understanding was that it’s less helpful for anything which isn’t in low-earth orbit because the commercial launch engineers are optimizing for the lucrative satellite business, not larger and higher payloads.
> commercial launch engineers are optimizing for the lucrative satellite business, not larger and higher payloads
Commercial satellites are getting bigger and heavier. Launch that can put big and heavy in LEO can put big and slightly less heavy higher up. Add to that things like in-orbit propellant transfer and there is a good chance astronomy sees a golden age in the coming decades (in countries with space access).
I’m not dismissing the problem. Just this analysis as meriting any conclusions. It’s a start. But it’s only part of a full model of how these changes would affect astronomy.
I get where you're coming from but we haven't really seen any sort of space based telescope designs that take advantage of the Falcon launch paradigm of cheap and reliable launches.
Some sort of modular telescope array that could be launched in pieces and self-assemble in orbit. Something that improves in capacity as more pieces are added.
Everything seems to have stalled in this field, as if it's just waiting for a Starship which may never come.
> we haven't really seen any sort of space based telescope designs
We’re only starting to truly mass manufacture satellites. A world with millions of satellites means one with lots of satellite production and design economies of scale. (Same for all manner of sensors and optics.)
> as if it's just waiting for a Starship which may never come
Or it may. We’ll know in a couple years. Building a scaling production system for Falcon right now would be silly.
And if Starship never works out, we probably don’t see millions of satellites. It’s a fundamentally tied problem, which is why I say the analysis is incomplete.
Larger rockets are inherently more efficient, which is why all the commercial providers are moving towards them. And while yes, most of the providers are targeting primarily for LEO, if you have high payload capacity to LEO you can solve your issue of getting anywhere by packing in a kick stage. And cheap third-party kick stages are available and more are in development.
Google says that James Webb telescope cost a total of $10bn. That's not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. Private citizens could afford to put similar things into space if they chose to. We don't need them to be cheaper.
I’d love to see an estimate of what a JWST-class telescope would cost to design, build and launch in a world maintaining a million-satellite fleet. My guess is less than $2bn.
A big part of the complexity of JWST was the way everything had to fold and fit into a small launch vehicle. With larger vehicles (e.g. Starship) the JWST mirror could have been built in one piece, which is much simpler. The whole thing was engineered to the max to fit within tight constraints, which is very expensive.
> With larger vehicles (e.g. Starship) the JWST mirror could have been built in one piece, which is much simpler
Not just the complexity of design, but also cost and complexity of cryo-vacuum testing hundreds of deployment mechanisms any one of whose failure critcially endangers the project. The mirror could also be conventionally manufactured versus requiring gold-plated beryllium [1].
Currently writing a draft blog post on all the issues (and non-issues) with these things, it is now long enough (7k words) I'm slightly wondering if it's less "a blog post" and more "one section of a decent sized book on why we can't have nice things".
Here's a visual to consider the implications of things you can do with actually one million satellites of the kind of size scale being discussed:
> Yes, they really would be this closely spaced: Earth's circumference is 40 million meters
Satellites don’t orbit on the ground, which makes the 40m spacing nonsense. And nobody proposes putting a million 120 kW satellites in a single orbit.
They really would never be that closely spaced. To approach those densities in a single orbital shell you’d need hundreds of billions of birds in orbit. Spread across all of LEO (and only LEO) we’re talking orders of magnitudes more satellites (like, quadrillions).
> Satellites don’t orbit on the ground, which makes the 40m spacing nonsense.
Hence why the horizontal scale bar says "40 m to 43 m": Going to 500 km doesn't add much to the orbit's circumference.
> And nobody proposes putting a million 120 kW satellites in a single orbit.
One of my tentative conclusions is that it would be an improvement if they did. But also, there's better contiguous structures to build if you could put that much up.
It's in my blog post because I'm considering all possible arrangements of ways to do this. Current list:
• Spread them out by altitude while still keeping them in sun-synchronous low earth orbit like SpaceX plan
• Put them all of them in a single sun-synchronous low earth orbit so none of them can hit each other
• Spread them out like Starlink currently is
• Have swarms, where each group has many satellites significantly closer to each other than the usual safety separation, like Google's Project Suncatcher
• Have fewer, bigger satellites, like Starcloud
> To approach those densities in a single orbital shell you’d need hundreds of billions of birds in orbit. Spread across all of LEO (and only LEO) we’re talking orders of magnitudes more satellites (like, quadrillions).
Matters less than I expected when I started writing. How much so depends on what I end up adding by treating gaps in "full" (up to the safety margin) orbits as the thing of interest and seeing if someone's done a version of this on spherical geometry and also add a time component: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/270937/how-can-you-...
(That I'm researching such questions should explain both why I'm at 7k words and why I've not published it yet).
Can all orbits be completely filled at once, though? They'll intersect at some point (I had originally said poles but that's only polar orbits..) ... I suppose you have phase, altitude and inclination (and eccentricity which adds another couple of variables). But they do intersect, don't they?
> Can all orbits be completely filled at once, though? They’ll intersect
Correct. I wasn’t proposing a realistic configuration. Just showing why OP’s visual doesn’t work for the numbers it gives. (It 1D space fills. I expand that to 2 and 3D.)
Millions of satellites is currently accepted as the maximum carrying capacity of LEO before collisions becomes a PITA.
Can't take advantage of the 3D-ness when you want them all to be in terminator-following SSOs. Best you get is 2D, and with current safety margins, even that fills up fast.
However, this was not the point of the illustration, which is more "if you can do this at all, you can do better".
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.
Starlink is already over-congested and physics says that it is not possible to scale it up to serve 100000000 subscribers let alone 5-6 billion or more. We would need some kind of physics breakthrough for that to scale properly, and I'm not even sure if physically it would even be possible to do that no matter what you threw at it. Starlink isn't magic as a lot of people seem to think it is.
> 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?
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.
> suppose one Starlink beam covers about 63 square miles
Is that the actual figure though?
> even a 100x improvement only gets you to about 300 kbps/person.
TBF even that would be quite useful for lots of things seeing as it's faster than the DSL service I once had. However agreed that it isn't going to replace fiber service and overbuilding to such an extent for outliers would be absurd.
Still, that's quite decent considering it's an estimate of a near worst case scenario.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
> None of the problems with building a utopia are technological
Of course they are. Pre-Green revolution humanity probably couldn’t make a utopia. Currently, I’d argue we need way more energy to make utopia-like conditions available to all.
Technology isn’t sufficient. But I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s unnecessary, unless one’s utopia permits dying horribly of infection due to minor cuts and abrasions.
Not entirely, but we have entirely eliminated at least one disease that was once so common there was a specific goddess to whom you prayed if you wanted to be cured of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shitala
We've also done pretty well at reducing deficiency diseases. How common in wealthy countries is it to know someone with scurvy, pellagra, rickets, goitre, or beriberi. Common words from the past.
First world problems (many of which were previously uncommon) are quite different.
Yeah, to shortcut the debate here, I think the crux of the argument is that, starting in the 80s, the capital & tech sets both started pointing to things like the smallpox vaccine and the green revolution and saying "See? This is why you need to get out of our way and just let us do our thing," whereas the rest of the world has been saying "the only reason any of that worked is because we built the social and political systems during the 50s, 60s, and 70s to get those solutions into the hands of the people." The argument to ignore the social, economic, and political effects of technology because eventually it makes the world better ignores the process by which it eventually makes the world better, and also ignores that it does not de-facto make the world better without those social and political processes. Technology should be encouraged, and also when you look around and see people starving or dying from preventable diseases while billionaires shoot people into space for the hell of it, the balance is off.
“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
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!
Mm. I know a (US) Green party campaigner who is a self-described communist (I forget which variety), who has yet to realise the contradiction between her love of trade unions and support of the environment when it presents itself in support of the famous UK coal miner's strikes.
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.
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.
It's easy to see why people fear AI when our leaders talk of a future where many are jobless and replaced with no solutions to fill in the gaps.
AI adoption is a leadership failure more than a tech one right now. If you make people feel empowered with it, it can liberate work-free lives that humanity benefits from. If you use it to destroy people's livelihoods with no options it's not going to survive a revolution.
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%.
AI is not going to give us a star trek utopia, AI is an attempt by the bourgeoise to alienate the average person from the capital that has previously always come free with their human life. AI promises a feudalist future where there is no capital that isn't owned by the ruling class. Its power is not democratized, it is concentrated in the hands of those building the data centers. That is why I'm against the data centers. I feel like all leftists should be.
> Its power is not democratized, it is concentrated in the hands of those building the data centers. That is why I'm against the data centers
If you really believe this (and I’m not saying I don’t, I just don’t have confidence in it), blocking domestic. datacenters doesn’t preserve that labour value. It just ensures whoever builds those datacenters controls production from afar.
Like, if AI really replaces human labour, does Africa and Europe having few AI datacenters protect it from America and China? Of course not. Not outside a symbolic level that even then would have to exist with the implied consent of the powers who produce.
xAI’s datacenters aren’t currently measurably replacing labour. So no, we’re not. If AI becomes economically competitive with broad sections of human labor, those who control it do have the power to replace humans.
But banning domestic datacenters doesn’t stop them from existing; it just stops them from existing here. If that precondition arises, that’s just a recipe for domestic deindustrialisation.
If you believe AI will replace human labor, blocking datacenters is silly. You want labor (or the public) to build and control them. I’m not convinced AI will replace labor, so I’m not yet at that step.
I think the point being made regarding xAI was that even if the datacenter is local that doesn't necessarily result in any meaningful difference. In other words, having more AI datacenters under your jurisdiction might or might not provide a meaningful ability to regulate in a way that shapes the impact of AI on the economy. (I do agree with you that it's almost certainly a good idea to have them though.)
> the point being made regarding xAI was that even if the datacenter is local that doesn't necessarily result in any meaningful difference
Oh, absolutely agree. But the datacentre in Memphis is within its jurisdiction. If Nashville decides to stick it with a tax to fund a UBI, they can. Sacramento and Columbus don't have that option.
To be clear, I am not arguing for more datacenters being built the way they are being built. But if you believe AI will replace labour, you want to control those datacenters. Blocking them explicitly cedes that control.
I think you may have misunderstood, I'm agreeing with you :)
> Sure. But what would have been better for the Fleet Street workers. The UK banning computerised printing? Or the union owning one?
Oh, definitely the latter.
The only way I see e.g. UBI working long-term is democratic* governments owning the means of production, and in the case of AI futures that means owning the compute, and the power supply for the compute.
Like, worker ownership of the means of production and the assets in general is idea. But I'm speaking as an Alaskan who is quite fond of the PFD and think it doesn't go far enough.
AI is wildly, wildly divergent in the possible futures it brings. It's really important to influence what happens, but don't limit the potential downside to only as bad as feudalism (neither neo-feudalist nor re-enacted): much worse monsters exist than the typical feudal lord.
(Was going to say "among those rulers who needed us alive to fight their wars and grow their food", but then I remembered Cambodia and Pol Pot).
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 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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
Why not, though? If any country violates their limit, just issue a concern. If they ignore it, upgrade it to a grave concern. Then they will surely have to obey, I mean, it's grave concern we're talking about, what else they could do?
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.
> 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.
“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.
> 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."
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.
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.
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.
We should introduce a global agreement that commercial satellites must fall out of the sky within a few years to reduce debris. It should be an agreeable term since the debris hinders everyone doing business up there. Every nation is going to partially ignore it anyway, for military purposes for example. But that’s a different demand than a cap on the total number of satellites.
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.
For the first time in human history, the generations living now have been systematically robbed of their ancestral right to witness the night sky and its jaw-droppingly awe-inspiring magnificence.
I'm building a weather app, so this hits close to home.
We talk about satellites as connectivity infrastructure, but I had not considered the impact to the night sky. I wonder if there are solutions like satellites posted further away around the moon with fewer relay satellites shared around the earth?
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.
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).
They aren’t in the Earth’s shadow at the start of the night
> For the SpaceX satellite mega-constellation, he found that dozens of trails would appear in each image taken two hours into the night with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) at Paranal Observatory in Chile
Not to mention the satellites of Reflect Orbital whose sole purpose is reflecting sun light into night areas
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!
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 misprioritized. It's like a land of people that behave like pets lacking practical self-sufficiency.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>the constant threat of big enough objects showing up on a collision course with earth
I don't really think this is a serious risk. This is a once-in-a-million-years kind of event.
Also, asteroid detection is not seriously affected by satellites. We can easily tell the difference between a moving satellite and a moving asteroid because of their speed.
> I don't really think this is a serious risk. This is a once-in-a-million-years kind of event.
Perhaps the last event was one million years ago and we are now (proverbially) 'due'.
> The gambler's fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy or the fallacy of the maturity of chances, is the belief that an independent and equally probable outcome which happened less frequently than expected is more likely to happen in the future (or vice versa).
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy
It's like people who say "it sure is strange that we had a 'once-in-a-century flood' two years in a row": that's not how odds/probabilities work.
* https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/we-had-a-100-year-flood-two-years-...
We might have even seen the Chelyabinsk one coming, with current tech.. if only it had been coming at us from a slightly less bright direction. That one was probably in the once-in-a-hundred-years category.
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?
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.
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
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.
> that constellation is already up there and if its fine right now
A lot of astronomers disagree.
All satellites in LEO only show up at close to 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).
Regardless of if they're all in one orbit or spread over in multiple orbits at different shells that are all terminator-following SSO, from the ground you're getting a train of things with somewhat higher brightness than the ISS, with a fairly small apparent separation that (I tentatively think) becomes less than your eyes can resolve at at least one point in the sky (if there's say 50 shells, where those 50 get close to crossing).
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.
> How do you balance human needs with pristine nature?
How about we set a limit on how many satellites? That’s exactly how to balance
Setting a limit on a number of satellites seems rather arbitrary and not very effective to actually achieve a specific result.
They hinder the view on asteroids coming our way.
The purpose of most of these satellites is internet access where we already have less limited possibilities with less maintenance costs like constant replacement
No they don't. It's more of an issue for long-exposure galaxies and nebula.
And asteroids are an extremely rare threat in the first place. It's literally a once-in-a-million-years kind of event.
Dinosaur killers? Yes.
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...
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’s why luck is a big factor and amateur astronomers are a great help in spotting them by chance
> They hinder the view on asteroids coming our way
Source?
> 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.
The article
>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.
There are many feasibility and safety issues associated with the Reflect Orbital plan. It doesn’t make as much sense as you might think. For instance, the satellites can only illuminate areas a relatively short time after local sunset. The Sun reflection could potentially damage an amateur astronomer’s eye if one of the satellites crosses their telescope’s field of view: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/true-cost-solar-powe...
> 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
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.
> Are they worth the cost/tradeoffs?
No. Lighting up the night is an abomination. Reflect Orbital can go fuck themselves.
Mindblowing that people are actually ok with this
>>Are they worth the cost/tradeoffs?
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.
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.
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.
They're already itching to throw space-lasers into orbit. [0]
I wish I was joking.
[0] https://www.jpost.com/defense-and-tech/article-900854
Or defense.
Defense is just a polite term 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.
What should the ratio be of missiles to missile interceptors?
Ideally 0:0
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.
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/...
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.
The article doesn’t consider that in a world with a million satellites in orbit, launching space-based telescopes—including into deep space—becomes an order of magnitude cheaper.
Does it? My understanding was that it’s less helpful for anything which isn’t in low-earth orbit because the commercial launch engineers are optimizing for the lucrative satellite business, not larger and higher payloads.
> commercial launch engineers are optimizing for the lucrative satellite business, not larger and higher payloads
Commercial satellites are getting bigger and heavier. Launch that can put big and heavy in LEO can put big and slightly less heavy higher up. Add to that things like in-orbit propellant transfer and there is a good chance astronomy sees a golden age in the coming decades (in countries with space access).
I’m not dismissing the problem. Just this analysis as meriting any conclusions. It’s a start. But it’s only part of a full model of how these changes would affect astronomy.
I get where you're coming from but we haven't really seen any sort of space based telescope designs that take advantage of the Falcon launch paradigm of cheap and reliable launches.
Some sort of modular telescope array that could be launched in pieces and self-assemble in orbit. Something that improves in capacity as more pieces are added.
Everything seems to have stalled in this field, as if it's just waiting for a Starship which may never come.
There are hundreds of Dove Satellites with telescopes in the Flock constellations from Planet Lab: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Labs
Most of them launched on the Falcon 9. They just point down to the Earth by default. ;-)
And there are other cubesats testing stuff for x-ray astronomy or gamma ray burst detection, such as:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VZLUSAT-2
> we haven't really seen any sort of space based telescope designs
We’re only starting to truly mass manufacture satellites. A world with millions of satellites means one with lots of satellite production and design economies of scale. (Same for all manner of sensors and optics.)
> as if it's just waiting for a Starship which may never come
Or it may. We’ll know in a couple years. Building a scaling production system for Falcon right now would be silly.
And if Starship never works out, we probably don’t see millions of satellites. It’s a fundamentally tied problem, which is why I say the analysis is incomplete.
Larger rockets are inherently more efficient, which is why all the commercial providers are moving towards them. And while yes, most of the providers are targeting primarily for LEO, if you have high payload capacity to LEO you can solve your issue of getting anywhere by packing in a kick stage. And cheap third-party kick stages are available and more are in development.
Google says that James Webb telescope cost a total of $10bn. That's not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. Private citizens could afford to put similar things into space if they chose to. We don't need them to be cheaper.
> James Webb telescope cost a total of $10bn
I’d love to see an estimate of what a JWST-class telescope would cost to design, build and launch in a world maintaining a million-satellite fleet. My guess is less than $2bn.
A big part of the complexity of JWST was the way everything had to fold and fit into a small launch vehicle. With larger vehicles (e.g. Starship) the JWST mirror could have been built in one piece, which is much simpler. The whole thing was engineered to the max to fit within tight constraints, which is very expensive.
> With larger vehicles (e.g. Starship) the JWST mirror could have been built in one piece, which is much simpler
Not just the complexity of design, but also cost and complexity of cryo-vacuum testing hundreds of deployment mechanisms any one of whose failure critcially endangers the project. The mirror could also be conventionally manufactured versus requiring gold-plated beryllium [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_Telescope_Element
Not to mention it would be much cheaper and quicker to launch if it could have any form of robotic or human servicing/tuning available.
Designing it to not fail at the start & then work without any help for decades must have also made it much more expensive.
Currently writing a draft blog post on all the issues (and non-issues) with these things, it is now long enough (7k words) I'm slightly wondering if it's less "a blog post" and more "one section of a decent sized book on why we can't have nice things".
Here's a visual to consider the implications of things you can do with actually one million satellites of the kind of size scale being discussed:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/BenWheatley/blog/refs/head...
> Yes, they really would be this closely spaced: Earth's circumference is 40 million meters
Satellites don’t orbit on the ground, which makes the 40m spacing nonsense. And nobody proposes putting a million 120 kW satellites in a single orbit.
They really would never be that closely spaced. To approach those densities in a single orbital shell you’d need hundreds of billions of birds in orbit. Spread across all of LEO (and only LEO) we’re talking orders of magnitudes more satellites (like, quadrillions).
> Satellites don’t orbit on the ground, which makes the 40m spacing nonsense.
Hence why the horizontal scale bar says "40 m to 43 m": Going to 500 km doesn't add much to the orbit's circumference.
> And nobody proposes putting a million 120 kW satellites in a single orbit.
One of my tentative conclusions is that it would be an improvement if they did. But also, there's better contiguous structures to build if you could put that much up.
It's in my blog post because I'm considering all possible arrangements of ways to do this. Current list:
> To approach those densities in a single orbital shell you’d need hundreds of billions of birds in orbit. Spread across all of LEO (and only LEO) we’re talking orders of magnitudes more satellites (like, quadrillions).Matters less than I expected when I started writing. How much so depends on what I end up adding by treating gaps in "full" (up to the safety margin) orbits as the thing of interest and seeing if someone's done a version of this on spherical geometry and also add a time component: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/270937/how-can-you-...
(That I'm researching such questions should explain both why I'm at 7k words and why I've not published it yet).
(One big surprise to me while researching this: along-track, cross-track, and radial positional error per unit time are all much higher than I would have guessed: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/smallsat/2015/all2015/58/).
Can all orbits be completely filled at once, though? They'll intersect at some point (I had originally said poles but that's only polar orbits..) ... I suppose you have phase, altitude and inclination (and eccentricity which adds another couple of variables). But they do intersect, don't they?
> Can all orbits be completely filled at once, though? They’ll intersect
Correct. I wasn’t proposing a realistic configuration. Just showing why OP’s visual doesn’t work for the numbers it gives. (It 1D space fills. I expand that to 2 and 3D.)
Millions of satellites is currently accepted as the maximum carrying capacity of LEO before collisions becomes a PITA.
Can't take advantage of the 3D-ness when you want them all to be in terminator-following SSOs. Best you get is 2D, and with current safety margins, even that fills up fast.
However, this was not the point of the illustration, which is more "if you can do this at all, you can do better".
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.
Starlink is already over-congested and physics says that it is not possible to scale it up to serve 100000000 subscribers let alone 5-6 billion or more. We would need some kind of physics breakthrough for that to scale properly, and I'm not even sure if physically it would even be possible to do that no matter what you threw at it. Starlink isn't magic as a lot of people seem to think it is.
> 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?
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.
> suppose one Starlink beam covers about 63 square miles
Is that the actual figure though?
> even a 100x improvement only gets you to about 300 kbps/person.
TBF even that would be quite useful for lots of things seeing as it's faster than the DSL service I once had. However agreed that it isn't going to replace fiber service and overbuilding to such an extent for outliers would be absurd.
Still, that's quite decent considering it's an estimate of a near worst case scenario.
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
note that including dead things in orbit
(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
* https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-space-orbit-satellit...
> we currently have no way to remove
Nature takes care of this for us in LEO. I’ve seen no serious plans to put millions of anything anywhere else.
> 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.
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.
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.
“if we get this right” is doing a whole lot of heavy lifting here.
But that’s the thing! We could and we can!
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.
> None of the problems with building a utopia are technological
Of course they are. Pre-Green revolution humanity probably couldn’t make a utopia. Currently, I’d argue we need way more energy to make utopia-like conditions available to all.
Technology isn’t sufficient. But I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s unnecessary, unless one’s utopia permits dying horribly of infection due to minor cuts and abrasions.
> Pre-Green revolution humanity probably couldn’t make a utopia.
Post-Green revolution humanity hasn’t pulled it off either.
Not entirely, but we have entirely eliminated at least one disease that was once so common there was a specific goddess to whom you prayed if you wanted to be cured of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shitala
We've also done pretty well at reducing deficiency diseases. How common in wealthy countries is it to know someone with scurvy, pellagra, rickets, goitre, or beriberi. Common words from the past.
First world problems (many of which were previously uncommon) are quite different.
What is your story for how smallpox was eliminated?
How, or when?
How is a lot of things, including the rich paying for it to be eliminated even in the poor nations who had no strong government to do this themselves.
When is where: https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/many-people-alive-t...
Yeah, to shortcut the debate here, I think the crux of the argument is that, starting in the 80s, the capital & tech sets both started pointing to things like the smallpox vaccine and the green revolution and saying "See? This is why you need to get out of our way and just let us do our thing," whereas the rest of the world has been saying "the only reason any of that worked is because we built the social and political systems during the 50s, 60s, and 70s to get those solutions into the hands of the people." The argument to ignore the social, economic, and political effects of technology because eventually it makes the world better ignores the process by which it eventually makes the world better, and also ignores that it does not de-facto make the world better without those social and political processes. Technology should be encouraged, and also when you look around and see people starving or dying from preventable diseases while billionaires shoot people into space for the hell of it, the balance is off.
It's a lot better than it was for the average human on earth than it was a couple centuries ago. Utopia can't happen overnight.
“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
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/
Those are all US stats.
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...
Even Star Trek admits that there are horrible events that lie between our world and the utopia.
then perhaps we should strive not to have those horrible events, not by having nostalgia but by dreaming of a better future.
If politics were trending left I’d agree with you, but as-is the bourgeoisie are the only ones that will get any upside from modern tech.
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.
The term "elite overproduction" comes to mind.
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!
Mm. I know a (US) Green party campaigner who is a self-described communist (I forget which variety), who has yet to realise the contradiction between her love of trade unions and support of the environment when it presents itself in support of the famous UK coal miner's strikes.
There isn’t a contradiction supporting working class coal miners when there’s no plan to transform their labor into green energy.
In 1990 I hoped my grandkids would be able to join starfleet. After watching most of the gains go to the worst, I just hope they can escape the borg.
I was a kid in the 90s. Kinda surprised we got the (almost) universal translator before we got fusion.
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.
Imperial Guard will welcome them with an open embrace once they reach conscription age! ;-)
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.
It's easy to see why people fear AI when our leaders talk of a future where many are jobless and replaced with no solutions to fill in the gaps.
AI adoption is a leadership failure more than a tech one right now. If you make people feel empowered with it, it can liberate work-free lives that humanity benefits from. If you use it to destroy people's livelihoods with no options it's not going to survive a revolution.
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%.
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.
AI is not going to give us a star trek utopia, AI is an attempt by the bourgeoise to alienate the average person from the capital that has previously always come free with their human life. AI promises a feudalist future where there is no capital that isn't owned by the ruling class. Its power is not democratized, it is concentrated in the hands of those building the data centers. That is why I'm against the data centers. I feel like all leftists should be.
> Its power is not democratized, it is concentrated in the hands of those building the data centers. That is why I'm against the data centers
If you really believe this (and I’m not saying I don’t, I just don’t have confidence in it), blocking domestic. datacenters doesn’t preserve that labour value. It just ensures whoever builds those datacenters controls production from afar.
Like, if AI really replaces human labour, does Africa and Europe having few AI datacenters protect it from America and China? Of course not. Not outside a symbolic level that even then would have to exist with the implied consent of the powers who produce.
Sorry, do Memphis residents get to control xAI's production? I think we're already in this situation.
> we're already in this situation
xAI’s datacenters aren’t currently measurably replacing labour. So no, we’re not. If AI becomes economically competitive with broad sections of human labor, those who control it do have the power to replace humans.
But banning domestic datacenters doesn’t stop them from existing; it just stops them from existing here. If that precondition arises, that’s just a recipe for domestic deindustrialisation.
If you believe AI will replace human labor, blocking datacenters is silly. You want labor (or the public) to build and control them. I’m not convinced AI will replace labor, so I’m not yet at that step.
I think the point being made regarding xAI was that even if the datacenter is local that doesn't necessarily result in any meaningful difference. In other words, having more AI datacenters under your jurisdiction might or might not provide a meaningful ability to regulate in a way that shapes the impact of AI on the economy. (I do agree with you that it's almost certainly a good idea to have them though.)
> the point being made regarding xAI was that even if the datacenter is local that doesn't necessarily result in any meaningful difference
Oh, absolutely agree. But the datacentre in Memphis is within its jurisdiction. If Nashville decides to stick it with a tax to fund a UBI, they can. Sacramento and Columbus don't have that option.
To be clear, I am not arguing for more datacenters being built the way they are being built. But if you believe AI will replace labour, you want to control those datacenters. Blocking them explicitly cedes that control.
Fleet Street in London used to print all the UK newspapers. They had unions who resisted automation.
In the 80s, Rupert Murdoch built, in secret, a new fully computerised printing plant built in Wapping.
The workers went on strike, so he fired them. Didn't even lose a single day of output*:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wapping_dispute
That is what you should fear from AI. Not the data centres themselves, that we could all be fired and the rich lose nothing as a result.
* [citation needed] :P
> That is what you should fear from AI. Not the data centres themselves, that we could all be fired and the rich lose nothing as a result
Sure. But what would have been better for the Fleet Street workers. The UK banning computerised printing? Or the union owning one?
If AI is going to be to jobs in general as computerised printing was to newspaper printing, just blocking it doesn't make sense. That's my argument.
I think you may have misunderstood, I'm agreeing with you :)
> Sure. But what would have been better for the Fleet Street workers. The UK banning computerised printing? Or the union owning one?
Oh, definitely the latter.
The only way I see e.g. UBI working long-term is democratic* governments owning the means of production, and in the case of AI futures that means owning the compute, and the power supply for the compute.
Right now, the UK power supply is… privatised.
* small-d, not The Dems, I'm not an American
This is totally the "near term" solution.
Like, worker ownership of the means of production and the assets in general is idea. But I'm speaking as an Alaskan who is quite fond of the PFD and think it doesn't go far enough.
> AI promises a feudalist future where there is no capital that isn't owned by the ruling class.
We may get that, but only if the ruling class want what the Victorians called a "folly": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folly
AI is wildly, wildly divergent in the possible futures it brings. It's really important to influence what happens, but don't limit the potential downside to only as bad as feudalism (neither neo-feudalist nor re-enacted): much worse monsters exist than the typical feudal lord.
(Was going to say "among those rulers who needed us alive to fight their wars and grow their food", but then I remembered Cambodia and Pol Pot).
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.
for reference https://x.com/Jeremyrand101/status/1981564984154005876
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.
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
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
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.
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 could absolutely see Europe Greenpeace-nuking its way out of having a LEO constellation while everyone else builds them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can you expand more on your plans to give Africans more access to high speed internet?
> we will build Sun orbital structures and swarms,
Another episode of arrogant fantasy in the ponyworld.
Hear, hear! Promote this man!
Shut these ridiculous baboons out of society. Take their TESCREAL libertarian nonsense with them.
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?
> 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?
Google “Kessler syndrome”.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
> a fair allocation
Who is doing this allocation? Who is going to tell Pyongyang, Beijing or Moscow they can’t launch anymore?
If we weren't busy stupidly destroying the institutions for international cooperation, it would be a UN body.
> it would be a UN body
No UN body can command a nuclear sovereign. They ultimately continually consent to oversight.
> No UN body can command a nuclear sovereign.
Why not, though? If any country violates their limit, just issue a concern. If they ignore it, upgrade it to a grave concern. Then they will surely have to obey, I mean, it's grave concern we're talking about, what else they could do?
lol and who's going to enforce it? The only things enforced are when USA/Russia/China care about it.
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.
Starlink satellites can provide anyone with Internet.
Can, but won't.
This is unrealistic, uncharitable, and tribalistic.
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.
> 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.
“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
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.
And swarms
> 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."
If we can launch 1M satellites, how many telescopes can we launch?
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?
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.
> 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.
Who is we? Certainly not amateur astronomers who made important discoveries with their telescopes
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.
With free access or only affordable for rich county citizens?
Or services where you can buy some photos, like we have for the telescopes pointed at earth
Great, a fee to look at the sky
Ugh the part about Munich is depressing. Finding a dark clear sky spot is one of the worlds greatest joys and most awesome experiences.
Of course this comes from a European organisation.
Europe has given up on advancing anything and their only solutions to problems is regulations.
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.
We should introduce a global agreement that commercial satellites must fall out of the sky within a few years to reduce debris. It should be an agreeable term since the debris hinders everyone doing business up there. Every nation is going to partially ignore it anyway, for military purposes for example. But that’s a different demand than a cap on the total number of satellites.
> we’re not trying to reduce light smog in Munich right now, are we
we aren't?
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
Should it be possible to coordinate orbits to create permanent clear spots on the sky where observatories are? A LEO no flight zone of sorts.
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.
For the first time in human history, the generations living now have been systematically robbed of their ancestral right to witness the night sky and its jaw-droppingly awe-inspiring magnificence.
you can still go outside at night and look up. get a grip.
I'm building a weather app, so this hits close to home.
We talk about satellites as connectivity infrastructure, but I had not considered the impact to the night sky. I wonder if there are solutions like satellites posted further away around the moon with fewer relay satellites shared around the earth?
Dumb question, can we put cameras on the backs of all these satellites, so they can record outside the atmosphere all the time?
For a very imprecise visual, I like the site https://satellite.love
It upsets me that an establishment like ESO would grip on the “data centers in space” narrative given the absurd physics constraints.
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.
How much CO2 does launching a million satellites produce? Is is significant compared to other sources of CO2?
Compare it to air planes, which are already at a much more significant scale. Accounting for fuel type and combustion efficiency seems relevant.
I recall around SpaceX 100th landing, that a day of just transatlantic flights was more than everything SpaceX had done to that point
Exactly, they don't matter when compared to general aviation or even just consumer shipping.
And in all cases, if you produce the fuel using renewables then the CO2 output is trivially brought near zero.
We should launch more orbital telescopes.
Why are they bright? Do they have big lights flashing or is it reflection
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).
And what are they reflecting when they are in Earth's shadow?
They aren’t in the Earth’s shadow at the start of the night
> For the SpaceX satellite mega-constellation, he found that dozens of trails would appear in each image taken two hours into the night with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) at Paranal Observatory in Chile
Not to mention the satellites of Reflect Orbital whose sole purpose is reflecting sun light into night areas
Wait for LEO EMPs in future conflicts.
Title is: One million satellites and mirrors in space pose grave threat to the night sky
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!
maybe for example because thanks to them we have satellites in the first place?
I agree with this and I'm not an astronomer btw.
> thanks to them we have satellites in the first place?
What kind of astronomy knowledge is required to launch a satellite?
Orbital mechanics are pretty important when you're launching something that orbits the Earth.
idk if I want to list all if it cause it will be very long but let's start with knowing that earth rotates on its axis;)
Fortunately, no one owns space, so we don’t have to listen to these decels.
For people that like to go outside on the other hand, its a real issue
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 misprioritized. It's like a land of people that behave like pets lacking practical self-sufficiency.
too late
https://satellitemap.space
there are already several starlink competitors and even other countries planning to launch their own 1000-10,000 node networks
ah and guess what. only western US / European countries are allowed to have them. The rest are called shadow fleet satellites.
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.
No, only 3.7%
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.
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.