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. 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 o…
This is a tradeoff we have to make with infrastructure and development in general. How do you balance human needs with pristine nature? 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? Satellites are actually easier than…
> How do you balance human needs with pristine nature? How about we set a limit on how many satellites? That’s exactly how to balance
Setting a limit on a number of satellites seems rather arbitrary and not very effective to actually achieve a specific result.
> commercial launch engineers are optimizing for the lucrative satellite business, not larger and higher payloads 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).…
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. 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. Everything seems to have stalled in this field, as if it's just waiting for a…
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/w…
Not to mention it would be much cheaper and quicker to launch if it could have any form of robotic or human servicing/tuning available.
Designing it to not fail at the start & then work without any help for decades must have also made it much more expensive.
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…
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.
Imperial Guard will welcome them with an open embrace once they reach conscription age! ;-)
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.
I was a kid in the 90s. Kinda surprised we got the (almost) universal translator before we got fusion.
This does happen quite often actually - the logical progression from telegraph to digital Internet networks was interrupted by the invention and deployment of the analog telephone network.
IMHO even analog television and microwave oven look kinda out of place with the technology deployed at the same time.
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. But there is the rest of the world, and if I'm told that…
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…
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. But there is the rest of the world, and if I'm told that…
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.
Unless you literally make Earth be indoors like in the Blame manga megastructure, any realistic satellite or debris swarm will either be in low orbit and will relatively soon burn up or in high orbit & spread over such a big area that with well planned trajectory it will not cause you any further issues.
What is your story for how smallpox was eliminated?
How, or when? How is a lot of things, including the rich paying for it to be eliminated even in the poor nations who had no strong government to do this themselves. When is where: https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/many-people-alive-t...
Yeah, to shortcut the debate here, I think the crux of the argument is that, starting in the 80s, the capital & tech sets both started pointing to things like the smallpox vaccine and the green revolution and saying "See? This is why you need to get out of our way and just let us do our thing," whereas the rest of the world has been saying "the only reason any of that worked is because we built the social and political systems during the 50s, 60s, and 70s to get those solutions into the hands of the people." The argument to ignore the social, economic, and political effects of technology because eventually it makes the world better ignores the process by which it eventually makes the world better, and also ignores that it does not de-facto make the world better without those social and political processes. Technology should be encouraged, and also when you look around and see people starving or dying from preventable diseases while billionaires shoot people into space for the hell of it, the balance is off.
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. 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 o…
The year is 2026. Surely the orbits of all the satellites are known well enough, and optics are modelled well enough for telescopes to know which few pixels to ignore at any given moment?