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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?
#52Earlier 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 (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 i…
> could have been outsourcing to China since 2000?
No need to guess. You can actually look at what was imported and exported and it’s nowhere close to making up that gap. 2.2 Billion tons / year isn’t difficult to track down.
> I would argue that it is not being actively addressed at all.
Coal is dying, oil and natural gas aren’t nearly as plentiful. Even if you assume we’re going to extract all the oil and natural gas that exists the worst case is net zero by 2100, with better options leaving more carbon in the ground. As 2 °C means ~620 ppm that’s seemingly already off the table which wasn’t guaranteed 20 years ago.
Re: Will satellite megaconstellations weaken earth's magnetic field?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 s…
Is anyone talking about being obstructionist for the sake of being obstructionist? This seems like a straw man.
The article raises concerns and calls for more studies.
Re: Will satellite megaconstellations weaken earth's magnetic field?
#54First thought that struck me was the Star Trek Episode where the scientist found out Warp Drive was weakening space-time, so that it could 'rip open'. The scientist were shunned, but eventually did prove it. But even then, the Federation could not "stop" using warp drive. It was one of first instances I saw that even in Star Trek, with all the high ideals, once confronted with something that would shut down progress…
Yeah humans are not too good at gracefully paradigm shifting. That is why in academia people usually wait for the old ones to die off before something truly new can be introduced. I'm not singling out academia, this is pretty much all over the the place.
This Star Trek just to show no matter how technologically advanced we are, we are still don't like go out side of our world view. Kind makes one thing should we all be focusing on technological advances, or how we can more gracefully shifting our paradigm, instead of waiting for old guys to die off.
Re: Will satellite megaconstellations weaken earth's magnetic field?
#55Hmm, maybe this is what is cauing this problem with north pole? https://www.newsweek.com/earth-magnetic-north-pole-follows-u...
Re: Will satellite megaconstellations weaken earth's magnetic field?
#56If metallic dust from burnt up satellites can affect the magnetosphere on earth, could we do the same to create a magnetosphere on mars?
Not really. Mars doesn't have an active magnetic core.
Re: Will satellite megaconstellations weaken earth's magnetic field?
#57The paper from this article says that only 450kg of charged material from meteorites enters the relevant part of the atmosphere each year. Yet the total amount of meteorites entering is somewhere in the range of 10^7 to 10^9kg per year [0]. I know the really small stuff slows down too quickly to burn up completely, but does anyone know why such a small fraction of the meteorites burns up in this region compared to sa…
Bottom end of the range: 10^7Kg per year would be about 27.5 tonnes per day.
The article references another piece[1] where they quote 54t per day, a similar number.
There's then an estimate made of how much of that is Aluminium - 1%.
I guess the author ran the 54t / 100 calc and came up with 0.45 instead of 0.54 ... a simple typo.
The key point is most of the natural stuff doesn't hang around up there.
Top end (10^9 Kg) of the range we get about 2750t per day natural origin. And at 1% for Aluminium that's 27.5t per day. That number is not far off the 29t estimated daily burn for the full Starlink v2 constellation they quote.
Also:
I notice that the Lodders article focussed specifically on Aluminium as it had been proposed as a method for geoengineering albedo.
There are other metals in the natural origin material, and I don't see why we should exclude those from affecting the Van Allen belts - is it only Aluminium that's bad?
Comparing the Starlink burn to the Van Allen material mass seems irrelevant when there's perhaps a few hundred tonnes per day of naturally arriving metals around too.
It's not obvious to me this topic can be waved away as not an issue though.
Re: Will satellite megaconstellations weaken earth's magnetic field?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Drastic harm may mean something different to you, but numbers aren’t subjective.
Why do you think DDT killed millions of people?
Re: Will satellite megaconstellations weaken earth's magnetic field?
#59Whether this researcher is correct or not, it certainly seems like the potential side effects of putting such large quantities of electronics and conductive particles into orbit is something that we should be seriously studying sooner rather than later. Are there inter-governmental agencies working on this problem?
The other thing that came to me is maybe companies like Starlink should be required to retrieve their satellites when they reach EOL rather than let them disintegrate.
Re: Will satellite megaconstellations weaken earth's magnetic field?
#60Sometimes 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.)
You must be thinking of Terminator.