Good morning. Starlink has now launched more than TEN THOUSAND satellites into orbit. Nearly 1400 have already been burned up in the atmosphere so far.
Here's a "lovely" image from my Kuiper Belt discovery program with dozens of satellite streaks in a 3 hour stacked exposure from CFHT. This was from 2022, when there were thousands fewer satellites... This is dumb.
Image credit: P. Cowan/W. Fraser/S. Lawler/CLASSY Survey Team
(The small streaks that are similar lengths are actually asteroids!)
@sundogplanets who cares about stars and human knowledge if some people get slightly faster Internet and the richest man on Earth can get few billions more? Come on, don't you want to embrace progress? /$
(so terribly sad...😭 )
Apparently it's not even faster internet, most places that use it would do much better with physical cables/fibres. The satellites are mainly there just to make Musk richer and more powerful.
@FediThing @sundogplanets fair enough and yes I believe when there is possibility of laying down a wire, it will be more faster, more reliable, lower latency... and even more importantly without such an asymmetry of power.
Even the guy next door can (yes with some effort and expertise, e.g. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/jared-mauch-didnt-have-good-broadband-so-he-built-his-own-fiber-isp/ but there are many more examples) lay down a fiber optic cable.
A fleet of satellites though that's different. It is by design, especially commercially, something that an individual must delegate their power to an institution.
So yes IMHO in addition to such terrible negative externalities it is by design a project to remove power to individuals rather than democratize access to knowledge.
TL;DR: yep, sucks.
Prof. Sam Lawler
Utopiah (Fabien Benetou)
FediThing 
