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.<p>More regulations would just have the result of cementing a monopoly for Spacex.
>SpaceX plans to send one million more satellites into orbit, for space-based data centres, ...<p>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...<p>>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.<p>Straight up nuts with no practical value, even if it did work out.
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.<p>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?<p>No. Lighting up the night is an abomination. Reflect Orbital can go fuck themselves.
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.<p>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 <i>current</i> 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<p>I don't really think this is a serious risk. This is a once-in-a-million-years kind of event.<p>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.
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?
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.<p>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.<p>You can bet Amazon and SpaceX will do the same no matter how the rest of us regrets it
This is a tradeoff we have to make with infrastructure and development in general. How do you balance human needs with pristine nature?<p>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?<p>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?<p>How about we set a limit on how many satellites? That’s exactly how to balance
They hinder the view on asteroids coming our way.<p>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.<p>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.<p>City killers? That size hits more often<p>> 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.<p>> 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.<p><a href="https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/chances-asteroid-hitting-earth" rel="nofollow">https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/chances-ast...</a>
> <i>They hinder the view on asteroids coming our way</i><p>Source?
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]<p>I wish I was joking.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.jpost.com/defense-and-tech/article-900854" rel="nofollow">https://www.jpost.com/defense-and-tech/article-900854</a>
Or defense.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>0: <a href="https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2026/07/02/africans-are-turning-to-starlink" rel="nofollow">https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2026/07/02/...</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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.
> <i>commercial launch engineers are optimizing for the lucrative satellite business, not larger and higher payloads</i><p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>Everything seems to have stalled in this field, as if it's just waiting for a Starship which may never come.
> <i>we haven't really seen any sort of space based telescope designs</i><p>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.)<p>> <i>as if it's just waiting for a Starship which may never come</i><p>Or it may. We’ll know in a couple years. Building a scaling production system for Falcon right now would be silly.<p>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.
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".<p>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:<p><a href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/BenWheatley/blog/refs/heads/main/2026/06/satellite_formation_pv_scaled.svg" rel="nofollow">https://raw.githubusercontent.com/BenWheatley/blog/refs/head...</a>
> <i>Yes, they really would be this closely spaced: Earth's circumference is 40 million meters</i><p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>> And nobody proposes putting a million 120 kW satellites in a single orbit.<p>One of my tentative conclusions is that it would be an improvement if they did.<p>It's in my blog post because I'm considering all possible arrangements of ways to do this. Current list:<p><pre><code> • 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
</code></pre>
> 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).<p>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: <a href="https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/270937/how-can-you-construct-as-many-intersections-as-possible-with-n-lines" rel="nofollow">https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/270937/how-can-you-...</a>
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?
> <i>Can all orbits be completely filled at once, though? They’ll intersect</i><p>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.)<p>Millions of satellites is currently accepted as the maximum carrying capacity of LEO before collisions becomes a PITA.
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,<p>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?
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<p>(that we currently have no way to remove)<p>is actually 32,000 not just 14,000<p>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<p>the problem is all that atmospheric burnup creates a lot of toxic pollution<p>* <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-space-orbit-satellites-pollution/" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-space-orbit-satellit...</a>
> These kinds of caps have for years been a dampener on human flourishing.<p>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.<p>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.<p>“You guys know we could basically live in a Star Trek style utopia if we get this right, right?”<p>“The DATA cenTERS are STEALING the water and breaking Taleckshual ProPerty LERRS!”<p>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.
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.
Even Star Trek admits that there are horrible events that lie between our world and the utopia.
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.
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.
> AI promises a feudalist future where there is no capital that isn't owned by the ruling class.<p>We may get that, but only if the ruling class want what the Victorians called a "folly": <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folly" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folly</a><p>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 <i>only</i> as bad as feudalism (neither neo-feudalist nor re-enacted): much worse monsters exist than the typical feudal lord.<p>(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>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><p>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.<p>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.
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.
In Star Trek canon, humanity figured out how to live in utopia by destroying all existing power structures in a Third World War.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Perhaps we could try to destroy those power structures without having a giant war lol, just saying.<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>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?"<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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!
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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>might</i> 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.<p>AI is a useful tool, but tools aren't always used to improve lives.
God you techbro dorks are so fucking annoying.<p>Kill. All. Trekkies. Now!
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 <a href="https://x.com/Jeremyrand101/status/1981564984154005876" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/Jeremyrand101/status/1981564984154005876</a><p>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.<p>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.<p>As though Africans aren't interested in the stars, or climate change, or that they can't figure out fibre optics is borderline racist.<p>Europe - and soon the rest of us - are facing massive heat waves that are likely driven by climate change, it's a real problem.<p>That's 'actual science'.<p>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.
This is a good point.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
> we will build Sun orbital structures and swarms,<p>Another episode of arrogant fantasy in the ponyworld.
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.<p>Why don’t “we” just build more cell towers?
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.
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).
> <i>a fair allocation</i><p>Who is doing this allocation? Who is going to tell Pyongyang, Beijing or Moscow they can’t launch anymore?
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.
This is unrealistic, uncharitable, and tribalistic.
<i>> 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.</i><p>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.<p>If I had to trace it to one source it would probably be the Club of Rome and <i>Limits to Growth.</i> Paul Erlich would be a close second with <i>The Population Bomb</i>.<p>Here’s a great podcast on the latter:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn1gieFMuWI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn1gieFMuWI</a><p>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.<p>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.<p>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<p>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<p>Technosolutionism is a cult. We either put the caps on ourself or nature will hard cap us anyways, in a much harsher way.
If we can launch 1M satellites, how many telescopes can we launch?
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.
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.
I really wanted to downvote this because I hate the constant EU bashing, but I just have to agree.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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<p>we aren't?<p>Bavarian Regulation on Light Pollution, Federal Nature Conservation Act, etc<p>Municipal lighting is regulated with light pollution in mind and allegedly you get fined over bright commercial lights at night
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.
For a very imprecise visual, I like the site <a href="https://satellite.love" rel="nofollow">https://satellite.love</a>
It upsets me that an establishment like ESO would grip on the “data centers in space” narrative given the absurd physics constraints.
Wait for LEO EMPs in future conflicts.
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.<p>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.<p>And in all cases, if you produce the fuel using renewables then the CO2 output is trivially brought near zero.
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<p>> 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<p>Not to mention the satellites of Reflect Orbital whose sole purpose is reflecting sun light into night areas
Title is: One million satellites and mirrors in space pose grave threat to the night sky
Fortunately, no one owns space, so we don’t have to listen to these decels.
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.
too late<p><a href="https://satellitemap.space" rel="nofollow">https://satellitemap.space</a><p>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.
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.
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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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I for one would much rather see effort put into advancing telescope design than blocking advances of our use of space!
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.<p>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.<p>Time to ignore the whingers and the NIMBYs and colonize the universe.