I hate Elon maybe even more than the next guy, but there are some major exaggerations here:
Starlink makes tons of maneuvers to avoid collisions: https://www.space.com/starlink-satellite-conjunction-increase-threatens-space-sustainability
Starlink is at an orbit that they are quickly returning to Earth and burning up on re-entry: https://cybernews.com/news/starlink-lost-200-satellites/
Sadly, it seems both sides of any discussion have now mastered hyperbole, manipulating statistics, leaving out facts and stretching the truth to make their argument. You basically can’t believe anything you read any longer.
Every government is running on fumes.
I appreciate the fact-check!
Yet you didnt bother doing it after reading, let alone before posting misinformation
I’m in the space industry and I can tell you that anyone pretending to be an authority on orbital mechanics on the internet is full of shit. I’ve taken entire classes called “advanced orbital mechanics.” That shit is wildly hard, vaguely inaccurate, and so slow that you can only do it effectively on a computer. Even then you have to decide which variables to throw out because you if you use them all you won’t be able to calculate predictions on every satellite in time for them to be useful. Then you have to take the predictions, predict how wrong they are, and predict again based on those predictions if two satellites will run into each other.
The truth is that nobody knows if Kessler Syndrome is even real. I personally fall on the side of thinking it’s nonsense, there are too many variables that would have to go wrong all at once. It’s like being worried about winning the lottery. There have been multiple catastrophic on orbit conjunctions that have created thousands of pieces of debris. Still no Kessler Syndrome. Even in a nightmare scenario I can only see it affecting one orbital regime. The odds of Starlink effecting the orbit that GPS is in is effectively not possible. But this is not a solved field and I am not remotely an expert, I’m just tired of people who don’t know a thing about the field thinking they’re experts because they have a JWST desktop wallpaper and have 300 hours in KSP. The real experts are ancient old men and women who have been doing orbital predictions for 40 years and I’ve seen them get into yelling matches about this sort of thing.
This post got away from me but the point is this shit is so involved it effectively can’t be fact checked because you could come to whatever conclusion you want.
If there’s anything I’ve noticed using Lemmy for news (before that I didn’t really have a general news source) it’s that the headline is always wrong, and the article almost always corrects it—but all of the comments are about always just people who read the headline and act as if it’s gospel with even reading the article.
If the sites didn’t put it all beyond pay walls it might remedy that problem a little bit. Force people to jump through hoops just to read shit journalism and they will do the easier thing: debate headlines.
Fact is, satellite internet from low earth orbit is the best solution in some parts of the world, and the ones to blame are literally the exact ISPs it’s competing with by providing service to the underserved. It’s a necessary option in providing the constant connectivity out society expects and relies upon (whether or not intermittent outages should be acceptable is a different discussion)
I would love to see some legislation requiring satellite ISPs to share infrastructure so we don’t have 3 incompatible competing services with duplicated but not necessarily redundant infrastructure. That would be a far more useful goal to push for
Spoiler: It’s 0.1 tonnes of CO2e per subscriber per year. This is not mentioned in the article.
This includes for example the emissions generated in the course of constructing the rockets that launch the satellites. So far it’s unclear to me whether, when comparing to terrestrial telecom, they include e.g. the emissions produced when manufacturing the trucks that deploy the infrastructure.
This also means the amount of emissions per user will go down the more users they get. It’s not very fair to compare something new to something that’s been around for decades in something that is based solely on the amount of users they have. I hate starlink, but this report is trash.
Emissions are going to go down when starship is made as well.
Starship uses a methane + oxygen fuel which burns cleaner, and can be produced with just water and CO2 making it carbon neutral.
I don’t think every flight will be neutral immediately, or what % will be consistently once its scaled up, but it’ll be better.
But 1 carbon neutral flight sending up hundreds of satellites will bring it down quickly. They could even save the carbon neutral flights for themselves for PR purposes.
Additionally, existing users are mostly in urban centers with very efficient infrastructure, starlink gives high bandwidth internet everywhere.
I’d like to see the CO2e cost of giving a user in the middle of Idaho or Montana a 100Mbps connection.
Thank you, I was wondering how high the emissions could possibly be for Internet access from the customer’s perspective. I figured simply owning a car probably smashed even “30x as much” as other ISPs
Seems like we can’t go a week between inaccurate posts complaining about Starlink getting traction
It’s almost as if a small percentage of Lemmy posts are generated with chatGPT to supply content.
Still better than the not-so-small percentage on Reddit… 🤷
In order to do what Starlink does, it would take laying millions of miles of cable or hundreds of thousands of cell towers. People need Internet options with better than a couple of Mb of bandwidth, and without draconian usage caps of a few tens of gigabytes. Without space-based systems, it’s economically unfeasible to service large areas with few customers. What do you think the carbon footprint of laying cable to a few remote islands is? Who is going to pay for that boondoggle? Starlink makes it economically possible.
You’re saying we have to fuck up the Earth one way or another so we might as well use rockets to do it?
“We” have no say in it, the guys with private islands who want to “work from home” while forcing their employees into useless offices, are going to fuck up the Earth… so this way they do it a tiny bit less.
It’s not economically possible unless it’s environmentally conscience as well
I’m actually surprised internet takes 3% the amount of energy it takes to get to space just to run some internet wires. I’d have thought it would be much much lower than that.
But also, starlink completes with geostationary satellite and home cellular connection more than internet over wires. Or even people who didn’t have an option before.
It also says per subscriber of which I assume there are significantly more regular internet users than Starlink
Did your intuition consider the energy required to dig a trench to bury the cale in? Or putting up posts to lift the cable off the ground? I didn’t consider it at first, but neither is done with climate neutral machinery.
The operational requirements are probably pretty similar, the satellites are obviously exclusively solar powered, so no contribution there.
Yeah I did, but cities where most of the internet users are have very short runs, and the cabling is usually installed with the building. Also, I think I’ve usually seen internet run with the telephone wires in rural areas rather than in trenches.
I’d like you all to consider that places where you’d use starlink are also significantly more than 30x farther away from civilization than the average land-based internet user.
Out in middle of nowhere Ohio, the only options are satellite and I’ll be damned if I’m doing to give Dish or Hughes net more money for worse speeds. Starlink is it until they actually run fiber out here.
My Internet here is like 1-3 Mbps if I’m lucky because I have 2 shitty options. Launch some more of these fuckers up there so I can have useful Internet.
How about we encourage more competition or make it state owned instead?
Starling isn’t competing with terrestrial ISPs, it’s competing with other sat-isps and WISPs which will never get better internet otherwise.
I mean it is competing with terrestrial ISPs who continue to offer fewer megabits than you have fingers in the year of our lord 2023
Make it owned by the people responsible for us having shit Internet to start with. Brilliant, what could go wrong?
Capitalists are the reason for that. Government involvement is just that the rules weren’t written well enough (although sometimes on purpose because they’re being paid, but still it’s the fault of capitalists, not the government).
No … the government is responsible for us. Lt having a useful public service. Capitalism is trash but at least we have space internet which is more than we were ever going to get from rich old fucks making laws. But then we get full on exceptional individuals that get angry because they think it’s gonna stop them from moving to Mars… in the words of Danny Boone " ain’t no motherfuckers gonna live on Mars".
Make it owned by the people responsible for us having shit Internet to start with. Brilliant, what could go wrong?
Hm that’s pretty misleading. 4G is an order of magnitude more power hungry than your wifi, and nobody blames them for it?
Why suddenly Muskrat is the problem?
This sub needs a fuckin identity already.
It’s like giving billionaires access to do reckless shit that can literally impact humanity’s future may be problematic.
Wow
But come on, think about all the jobs it created!
They just don’t care. If they could earn a trillion knowing that the gain would destroy the planet in 10 years, they would. They’re out of control, and the states on their knees to beg their money.
