Mastodon MigrationSo in addition to cluttering up low earth orbit, wrecking terrestrial astronomy, creating the potential for a Kessler Syndrome cascade which could close access to space, and creating a national security nightmare, Starlink internet access is a climate catastrophe using up to 30 times more carbon footprint per internet subscriber than land based internet.
̶s̶e̶t̶h̶ ̶ ̶Are you going to be the one to tell people who live in the Solomons or Ethiopia or rural Oklahoma that they can't have internet because the "carbon footprint" is too big?
Starlink and services like it exist because for a lot of people there aren't other options. And when there are, they can be heavily censored.
So yeah, we should make our satellites less reflective, clean up light pollution, and cut CO₂.
But let's keep the internet on for everyone while we do that, ok?
Michael Busch@seth @mastodonmigration Starlink cannot and is not designed to provide many people with internet access - it can't handle the bandwidth. It is designed to provide a small number of users slightly lower latency at a steep financial premium, along with the environmental harm it does.
Don't believe the hype.
And to actually get people internet access; advocate for rolling out fiber optics and local wireless.
Karl Auerbach@michael_w_busch @seth @mastodonmigration We dealt with the remote access issue at Sun around 1990 - we found LEO satellites quite useful (we piggybacked onto a leftover USSR LEO Constellation). The world is too big to drag copper wires or glass fiber to every possible end point.
We experimented with inter-satellite relaying, something that Starlink is going to do (if not already). It's hard to do - lots of surprise problems, like a receiver being blinded by the sun or moon behind a transmitter, and the routing metrics are opposite what we use on the ground (i.e. a big issue is to conserve power.)
On the other hand, I am very aware of the environmental costs of having to replace satellites every year or two. And I know many astronomers who loudly complain of the damage that these constellations are doing to scientific observations.