★ Amy Star ★the easiest way to become radicalized about astronomy is to open a stargazing app and to make it highlight Starlink satellites
Natalie Raine
Kevin in Alaska@AmyZenunim fwiw this issue is more complicated for people living in remote communities without other high speed internet options
Mastodon Migration@feelnotes @AmyZenunim Sorry no. Remote internet does not justify filling low earth orbit with space junk and wrecking terrestrial astronomy. And once these things start smashing into each other we are going to have real problem. This is insanity.
Crab 🦀@mastodonmigration @feelnotes @AmyZenunim Hopefully they launch more polar ones soon, I still only have about 75% uptime in central Alaska. Having lived with internet so slow that webpages would often time out and driving 40 miles round trip to hand someone a flash drive with 250mb of data was significantly faster than uploading it to the cloud, Starlink is an absolute godsend. I used to drive my DESKTOP computer into town to do windows & Steam updates because they would take days otherwise (if I was lucky enough that they didn’t fail), and now I can do them in 15 minutes.
@mastodonmigration @AmyZenunim i completely agree that there are terrible costs to starlink. but in rural communities that don’t have other internet options, starlink means you can meet with a doctor through telemedicine, attend online classes and earn a degree, start an online business, facetime with a loved one. what do we tell these people? “sorry the technology we used to connect the world wasn’t designed with you in mind.” my only point is this issue isn’t so simple as “starlink bad”
Mele@feelnotes Starlink provides a useful service for sure but at what cost? How is it, that a single company can litter the night sky that belongs to all humanity with their commercial junk for private profit? How profitable is it even? Not a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely wondering if it actually is sustainable at all. Even with SpaceX's reusable rockets, sending stuff into orbit isn't cheap and the satellites have a very short lifespan. Do the subscription fees really cover all that or is the whole thing just running on investor money and government subsidies? As far as I know (might be wrong here,) Starlink's inter-satellite routing isn't up yet, so where-ever Starlink is used, there has to be fiber nearby anyway, so it feels to me that improving the local cellular infrastructure would be cheaper.
Just Jo@feelnotes @mastodonmigration @AmyZenunim how do you get power to rural communities?
Via power lines right? And you couldn't run fibre.. because..?
Rural communities could have had Gbps Internet today if you spent the last 10 years laying cable instead of launching junk. Junk that needs to be relaunched every 5 years.
There are other people on this rock that, in case you forgot, is already on fire from all the waste.
@JoTheBuzzyard i live in alaska, which has over 150 independent electric grids spread across the state. there is no statewide power grid here. there is no statewide road system. rural alaskan villages are like island communities in terms of utility infrastructure.
PulkoMandy@mastodonmigration @feelnotes @AmyZenunim
It would be possible to provide worldwide coverage with a dozen or so of GEO orbit satellites (with higher latency, but it's sufficient for a lot of uses)
Starlink is currently more than half of all satellites in orbit (4000 out of 8000), and plans to continue growing until they have 10x more than everyone else combined (40000 or so)
This is not at all a reasonable use of resources.
LisPi@feelnotes @AmyZenunim High-speed point-to-point radio links would be *much* cheaper than putting up a single one of these satellites (even rolling out fiber would be competitive) and would provide better bandwidth for such a community to the nearest internet exchange.
Peter Brown@lispi314 @feelnotes @AmyZenunim landlines already use radio and microwave links. Can’t see why the Internet can’t use them as well.