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“Beyond the limit”: Satellites and mirrors in space pose threat to the night sky

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Re: “Beyond the limit”: Satellites and mirrors in space pose threat to the night sky

#131

Post by piloto_ciego »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #79
piloto_ciego wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. “You guys know we could basically live in a Star Trek style utopia if we get this right, right?” “The DATA cenTERS are STEALING the water and breaking Taleckshual ProPerty LERRS!” Like, I thought we were for pirac…

Even Star Trek admits that there are horrible events that lie between our world and the utopia.

then perhaps we should strive not to have those horrible events, not by having nostalgia but by dreaming of a better future.

Re: “Beyond the limit”: Satellites and mirrors in space pose threat to the night sky

#132

Post by JumpCrisscross »

HPsquared wrote: post #128
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> James Webb telescope cost a total of $10bn I’d love to see an estimate of what a JWST-class telescope would cost to design, build and launch in a world maintaining a million-satellite fleet. My guess is less than $2bn.

A big part of the complexity of JWST was the way everything had to fold and fit into a small launch vehicle. With larger vehicles (e.g. Starship) the JWST mirror could have been built in one piece, which is much simpler. The whole thing was engineered to the max to fit within tight constraints, which is very expensive.

> With larger vehicles (e.g. Starship) the JWST mirror could have been built in one piece, which is much simpler

Not just the complexity of design, but also cost and complexity of cryo-vacuum testing hundreds of deployment mechanisms any one of whose failure critcially endangers the project. The mirror could also be conventionally manufactured versus requiring gold-plated beryllium [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_Telescope_Element

Re: “Beyond the limit”: Satellites and mirrors in space pose threat to the night sky

#133

Post by piloto_ciego »

SidewaysView wrote: post #113
piloto_ciego wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. “You guys know we could basically live in a Star Trek style utopia if we get this right, right?” “The DATA cenTERS are STEALING the water and breaking Taleckshual ProPerty LERRS!” Like, I thought we were for pirac…

[flagged]

Why exactly are you here?

Re: “Beyond the limit”: Satellites and mirrors in space pose threat to the night sky

#134

Post by ben_w »

tadfisher wrote: post #94
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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. Like, if AI really replaces human labo…

Sorry, do Memphis residents get to control xAI's production? I think we're already in this situation.

Fleet Street in London used to print all the UK newspapers. They had unions who resisted automation.

In the 80s, Rupert Murdoch built, in secret, a new fully computerised printing plant built in Wapping.

The workers went on strike, so he fired them. Didn't even lose a single day of output*:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wapping_dispute

That is what you should fear from AI. Not the data centres themselves, that we could all be fired and the rich lose nothing as a result.

* [citation needed] :P

Re: “Beyond the limit”: Satellites and mirrors in space pose threat to the night sky

#135

Post by HPsquared »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #105
ben_w wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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". 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: https://raw.githubuse…

> Yes, they really would be this closely spaced: Earth's circumference is 40 million meters 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. 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…

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?

Re: “Beyond the limit”: Satellites and mirrors in space pose threat to the night sky

#136

Post by roughly »

piloto_ciego wrote: post #104
hack1312 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“if we get this right” is doing a whole lot of heavy lifting here.

But that’s the thing! We could and we can!

None of the problems with building a utopia are technological, all of the problems are social and political. What the people arguing with you are telling you is that if you ignore the social and political problems, you're going to continue to create exactly the same kinds of problems that have been caused by every other attempt to solve social and political problems with technology. When you can figure out why people in the richest country on earth lack access to health care and food, neither of which are currently limited by actual abundance or availability, we can start talking about whatever other material things you think we need to live in paradise.

Re: “Beyond the limit”: Satellites and mirrors in space pose threat to the night sky

#137

Post by piloto_ciego »

throwaway-11-1 wrote: post #130
piloto_ciego wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that’s the thing! We could and we can!

“We” can’t even effectively distribute food, healthcare and housing yet but yeah I’m sure capital will totally figure it out if we build enough machines that just accumulate more wealth to the richest people in history. I love cool new tech but I’m perfectly aware it will not do shit to solve any problem other than “eliminate or make labor cheaper”

I mean, there are less starving people than there were in most of the world. We've made progress. In my lifetime we've made progress! I mean, there are momentary set backs and they are egregious, I agree with that for sure, but the world is wildly better than it was in the early 90s or early 00s.

I was there (cue Elrond meme), I remember.

And god forbid you were gay back then, or had an ailment that needed some high tech treatment, or needed to talk to someone on the other side of the planet for any reason, or wanted to have access to knoeledge.

We've come so far, and the people yapping about how "everything is the worst" are reactionary. Yes there are problems, I don't want to downplay them. But largely, until very recently, things were getting better en masse and zoomed out enough in time that trend will likely continue if we don't blow it all up or do something stupid like decide that science is too scary to do.

What I mostly see in these threads is "Capitalist Realism" - people can't even imagine things turning out some way other than "capital controls everything forever."

Re: “Beyond the limit”: Satellites and mirrors in space pose threat to the night sky

#138

Post by JumpCrisscross »

ben_w wrote: post #134
tadfisher wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, do Memphis residents get to control xAI's production? I think we're already in this situation.

Fleet Street in London used to print all the UK newspapers. They had unions who resisted automation. In the 80s, Rupert Murdoch built, in secret, a new fully computerised printing plant built in Wapping. The workers went on strike, so he fired them. Didn't even lose a single day of output*: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wapping_dispute That is what you should fear from AI. Not the data centres themselves, that we cou…

> That is what you should fear from AI. Not the data centres themselves, that we could all be fired and the rich lose nothing as a result

Sure. But what would have been better for the Fleet Street workers. The UK banning computerised printing? Or the union owning one?

If AI is going to be to jobs in general as computerised printing was to newspaper printing, just blocking it doesn't make sense. That's my argument.

Re: “Beyond the limit”: Satellites and mirrors in space pose threat to the night sky

#139

Post by ben_w »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #138
ben_w wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fleet Street in London used to print all the UK newspapers. They had unions who resisted automation. In the 80s, Rupert Murdoch built, in secret, a new fully computerised printing plant built in Wapping. The workers went on strike, so he fired them. Didn't even lose a single day of output*: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wapping_dispute That is what you should fear from AI. Not the data centres themselves, that we cou…

> That is what you should fear from AI. Not the data centres themselves, that we could all be fired and the rich lose nothing as a result Sure. But what would have been better for the Fleet Street workers. The UK banning computerised printing? Or the union owning one? If AI is going to be to jobs in general as computerised printing was to newspaper printing, just blocking it doesn't make sense. That's my argument.

I think you may have misunderstood, I'm agreeing with you :)

> Sure. But what would have been better for the Fleet Street workers. The UK banning computerised printing? Or the union owning one?

Oh, definitely the latter.

The only way I see e.g. UBI working long-term is democratic* governments owning the means of production, and in the case of AI futures that means owning the compute, and the power supply for the compute.

Right now, the UK power supply is… privatised.

* small-d, not The Dems, I'm not an American

Re: “Beyond the limit”: Satellites and mirrors in space pose threat to the night sky

#140

Post by JumpCrisscross »

HPsquared wrote: post #135
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, they really would be this closely spaced: Earth's circumference is 40 million meters 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. 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…

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?

> Can all orbits be completely filled at once, though? They’ll intersect

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.)

Millions of satellites is currently accepted as the maximum carrying capacity of LEO before collisions becomes a PITA.

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