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Will satellite megaconstellations weaken earth's magnetic field?

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Re: Will satellite megaconstellations weaken earth's magnetic field?

#41

Post by palata »

mlindner wrote: post #30
lupusreal wrote: post #10

Sometimes it seems like some people have a pathological need to be a doomer about any human activity. See also: "Kessler syndrome" doomerism about LEO satellites, the debris of which would only be a concern for a few years.

Indeed. Problems are things to be solved, not a reason to put up blockers preventing things from happening. Kessler syndrome is even greatly misunderstood because of movies like Gravity. People think of it as one satellite getting kicked over and then there's a sudden chain reaction of satellite after satellite being destroyed in the time span of hours/days. When in fact it's likely that Kessler syndrome is probably…

> Problems are things to be solved, not a reason to put up blockers preventing things from happening.

Unless the problem is that those things are happening, in which case the solution is to put up blockers...

Re: Will satellite megaconstellations weaken earth's magnetic field?

#42

Post by geerlingguy »

bilsbie wrote: post #19
lupusreal wrote: post #10

Sometimes it seems like some people have a pathological need to be a doomer about any human activity. See also: "Kessler syndrome" doomerism about LEO satellites, the debris of which would only be a concern for a few years.

Almost every technology gets assigned its own existential crisis. I’m not sure what that’s about. (I trace it all back to Jurassic park. It trained an entire generation to be afraid of technology.)

I grew up watching Jurassic Park, and the main takeaway was technology is amazing, but many people will abuse it to get what they want without any regard for potential devastating consequences, often ignoring any logical argument against it if they've already found a path towards profitability.

Re: Will satellite megaconstellations weaken earth's magnetic field?

#43

Post by palata »

Retric wrote: post #26
goku12 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends on the profits. The problem is solved only if the cost of fighting regulations (misinformation, lobbying, discrediting, defaming, bribing and sabotage) is less than the profits people make by causing the problem in the first place. There are several examples of this - but none more obvious than the climate catastrophe.

The worlds CO2 PPM would be significantly higher if nobody had done anything to mitigate the issue. America’s per capita CO2 emissions are down 6.6 tons (31%) per person just from 2000. Last year that saved ~2.2 Billion tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere. People look at China’s growing emissions and get concerned, but just imagine if they still got 81% of their electricity from coal instead of already getting ~…

> America’s per capita CO2 emissions are down 6.6 tons (31%) per person just from 2000.

That's a completely wrong way to look at it. A country can lower its emissions by outsourcing the activities that make them. Do I have to elaborate on what America could have been outsourcing to China since 2000?

The per capita C02 emissions, assuming that you don't ignore all of those that happen outside the country, have kept increasing since 2000.

> Clearly climate change is still a major issue, but it’s a major issue being actively addressed.

I would argue that it is not being actively addressed at all. Hell we don't even agree on whether we need to "accelerate our emissions with the hope that a miracle will happen and give us a technology that saves us" or "slow down and start preparing society for a world with less energy".

Re: Will satellite megaconstellations weaken earth's magnetic field?

#45

Post by mlindner »

palata wrote: post #41
mlindner wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Problems are things to be solved, not a reason to put up blockers preventing things from happening. Kessler syndrome is even greatly misunderstood because of movies like Gravity. People think of it as one satellite getting kicked over and then there's a sudden chain reaction of satellite after satellite being destroyed in the time span of hours/days. When in fact it's likely that Kessler syndrome is probably…

> Problems are things to be solved, not a reason to put up blockers preventing things from happening. Unless the problem is that those things are happening, in which case the solution is to put up blockers...

Not really what I was saying. I'm talking about being obstructionist for the sake of being obstructionist, primarily focused around appeals to nature and digging for reasons that can be used as an excuse to justify the appeal to nature.

If the end result of your thinking is "this has too many bad effects so we can never do this entire category of thing" then you've gone off the cliff. The solution is to fix the bad side effects while continuing the beneficial thing rather than saying you can't do anything at all.

Re: Will satellite megaconstellations weaken earth's magnetic field?

#46

Post by LeifCarrotson »

h2odragon wrote: post #27

Earth's magnetic field != ionosphere > Here it will be shown that the mass of the conductive particles left behind from worldwide distribution of re-entry satellites is already billions of times greater than the mass of the Van Allen Belts. made me say "really?" so i went and found this: https://spacemath.gsfc.nasa.gov/earth/RBSP7.pdf That estimates the mass of the Van Allen belts at 11 grams Which makes me wonder ab…

And conductive particles != charged particles.

It seems they're using different kinds of particle counts for the mass of the Van Allen belts and the mass of the satellites and meteors. The high-energy dissociated subatomic particles in the Van Allen belts do not form from decaying meteorites or satellites unless you put those meteorites and satellites in a particle accelerator.

And further, the 'textbook undergraduate physics problem' of finding the magnetic field outside a conductive shell assumes that infinitesimal concentrations of aerosolized conductive particles form a fully conductive shield.

Yes, I understand that when heated to a plasma these concentrations matter, but it's disingenuous to compare them in the way the article does.

Re: Will satellite megaconstellations weaken earth's magnetic field?

#47

Post by marcosdumay »

Retric wrote: post #13
thesnide wrote: post #5

That it is true or not is irrelevant. Fact is that it will a endless quarrel between scientists, until enough time has passed, where it is either: * forgotten as the problem was not real * too late as the problem was real History will repeat itself subtly, that's the only certainty

Humanity has actually solved many issues brought up by scientists before they caused drastic harm. A few that come to mind are acid rain, smog, DDT, and CFC’s. Catalytic converters in aggregate costs something like 1/2 a trillion dollars for clean air. We don’t hear about Acid rain because sulfur dioxide emissions are down well over 90% thus dealing with the actual problem. Even CO2 emissions are well below the “do n…

Well, I do agree with the general point, but smog and DDT did cause drastic harm. Those two killed millions of people.

Re: Will satellite megaconstellations weaken earth's magnetic field?

#49

Post by Retric »

goku12 wrote: post #35
Retric wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worlds CO2 PPM would be significantly higher if nobody had done anything to mitigate the issue. America’s per capita CO2 emissions are down 6.6 tons (31%) per person just from 2000. Last year that saved ~2.2 Billion tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere. People look at China’s growing emissions and get concerned, but just imagine if they still got 81% of their electricity from coal instead of already getting ~…

> America’s per capita CO2 emissions are down 6.6 tons per person just from 2000. Last year that saved ~2.2 Billion tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere. People look at China’s growing emissions and get concerned, but just imagine if they still got 81% of their electricity from coal instead of getting ~2.2 TWh of electricity per year from renewables. All those claims ring hollow after all the serious damage to th…

> What's the point of gloating when issue has not been addressed?

It is being addressed. A month before net zero the problem won’t be over, but it’s also far from unaddressed.

Progress is about rates of change not success. A real argument can be made that we are more than 1/3 of the way to net zero. Back in 1892 nobody was willing to give up heating their homes with coal, but today are homes can remain toasty without the need to burn fossil fuels. Coal is almost dead so it’s mostly oil and natural gas which are being replaced and far less plentiful.

If nothing else at current oil consumption proven reserves run out around 2070. Humanity could absolutely fuck the world beyond recognition using coal, oil isn’t as plentiful.

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