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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

#221

Post by throwaway-11-1 »

ben_w wrote: post #176
throwaway-11-1 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your response is not addressing my claims, homelessness is increasing, life expectancy is lagging poorer countries and there are still food security issues not being addressed in the richest country in history. I’m discussing material outcomes and you want to focus on social progress….which is fine I guess? Anyway I have receipts https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-lif... https://www.unc.edu/disc…

Those are all US stats. US got problems. World's much bigger than the US, and is getting better: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy?time=1770... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/prevalence-of-undernouris... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-population-living-i...

Yeah that’s totally fair and really good to see. It’s maybe the one perspective that gives me some hope

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

#222

Post by SubiculumCode »

alchemism wrote: post #214
SubiculumCode wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is this mistaken idea out there that if the U.S. were to disarm, then other nations would also disarm, and the whole world would live in peace. But history tells us over and over that power abhors a vacuum, and were the U.S. to leave the world, another would take its place, probably Russia or China. If we disarmed, then another nation with arms will inevitably invade the U.S.

Fun fact: a successful invasion of the North American continent has very little to do with weaponry and more to do with logistics and projection of force across an ocean. There is only one superpower with the capabilities to do it at all.

Yes. Right now...because the U.S. had the biggest baddest military that the world had ever known. If we had not had that, someone else would have made one. It's one thing to forgo an option that does not seem viable versus expecting the same decision when it is.

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

#223

Post by SubiculumCode »

runarberg wrote: post #213
enoint wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What should the ratio be of missiles to missile interceptors?

Ideally 0:0

Since that ideal is not ever going to be a reality unless every human is dead, I'll treat that as a deflection. Having to govern means throwing away fantasies and working with the world we actually live in to protect our actually very real families.

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

#224

Post by jdub »

piloto_ciego wrote: post #48
arjie wrote: post #13

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…

You reckon large language models run by this mob of billionaire boot-licking dweebs will lead to a Star Trek style utopia? Come on.

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

#225

Post by ben_w »

roughly wrote: post #199
ben_w wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 politic…

Agreed, that argument seems sound.

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

#226

Post by inglor_cz »

alchemism wrote: post #214
SubiculumCode wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is this mistaken idea out there that if the U.S. were to disarm, then other nations would also disarm, and the whole world would live in peace. But history tells us over and over that power abhors a vacuum, and were the U.S. to leave the world, another would take its place, probably Russia or China. If we disarmed, then another nation with arms will inevitably invade the U.S.

Fun fact: a successful invasion of the North American continent has very little to do with weaponry and more to do with logistics and projection of force across an ocean. There is only one superpower with the capabilities to do it at all.

If you are OK with US isolationism, then your fun fact is very salient.

If you'd like to keep the US-led coalition of mostly free countries intact, then your concept of the US military needs must include a lot more activity that just "defending from a hypothetical invasion of North America by Old World powers". Defense of allies elsewhere, keeping trade routes on the ocean open and safe.

I think the fiascos around tariffs demonstrated quite nicely why glorious autarky is no longer an option. Too much stuff is produced elsewhere, from resources to highly specialized products like icebreakers.

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

#227

Post by bpodgursky »

SilverElfin wrote: post #31
xadhominemx wrote: post #5

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.

China’s constellations are going to orbits that will take hundreds of years to return to earth and could make launching much harder if there is a collision. As far as I know only SpaceX has satellites in low orbits that frequently need propulsion to push back up, and fall back within 5 years.

OK and we aren't going to stop China from doing it. They do what they want. So there's nothing to fuss about.

This article mentions SpaceX 7 times and China once incidentally, they want to nag SpaceX into doing things that don't matter when China's launches do matter and nobody is going to nag them into decelerating.

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

#228

Post by privong »

anabab wrote: post #200
edelbitter wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There's at least two issues with this line of thinking:

1. many astronomical observations are long integrations (many minutes of open shutter) and you often cannot read out the pixels during the exposure. So you can't selectively ignore pixels on a "by moment" basis. And with enough satellites, enough pixels could be affected to render an entire image effectively unusable

2. It seems you're thinking only about optical astronomy. There's also a ton of radio/millimeter wave astronomy that's done from the ground. Satellites have radio-wave downlinks that can be powerful enough to destroy the electronics used in radio astronomy receivers. The US's National Radio Astronomy Observatory has been working on data sharing with Starlink to mitigate this, but it's basically up to companies to agree to work together. Other satellites / companies don't engage in this coordination and so some radio telescopes need to go to a "safe"/stow position to protect the electronics. This costs valuable observing time.

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

#229

Post by KeplerBoy »

throw0101a wrote: post #203
Legend2440 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the constant threat of big enough objects showing up on a collision course with earth I don't really think this is a serious risk. This is a once-in-a-million-years kind of event. Also, asteroid detection is not seriously affected by satellites. We can easily tell the difference between a moving satellite and a moving asteroid because of their speed.

> I don't really think this is a serious risk. This is a once-in-a-million-years kind of event. Perhaps the last event was one million years ago and we are now (proverbially) 'due'. > The gambler's fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy or the fallacy of the maturity of chances, is the belief that an independent and equally probable outcome which happened less frequently than expected is more likely to happen…

> It's like people who say "it sure is strange that we had a 'once-in-a-century flood' two years in a row": that's not how odds/probabilities work.

That usually refers to climate change and the fact that the odds have changed against our favor.

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

#230

Post by zzrrt »

piloto_ciego wrote: post #145
tadfisher wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Star Trek canon, humanity figured out how to live in utopia by destroying all existing power structures in a Third World War. What is happening now is we have all our existing structure, and the existing requirement to earn money to live within this structure, and the human creative output we want in our eventual utopia is used to train automata with the express goal to replace humans in those creative endeavors,…

> In Star Trek canon, humanity figured out how to live in utopia by destroying all existing power structures in a Third World War. Perhaps we could try to destroy those power structures without having a giant war lol, just saying. > What is happening now is we have all our existing structure, and the existing requirement to earn money to live within this structure, and the human creative output we want in our eventua…

> Perhaps we could try to destroy those power structures without having a giant war

The power structure is what is putting out the satellites and datacenters that you hope will bring the Star Trek utopia. Not sure you can both destroy it and reap its fruit, or that the fruit is not poisoned by the immorality and antisociality of the current power structure anyway.

Also, in Starlink's case, if utopic United Earth becomes real, it will probably be cheaper to lay fiber and cell towers, so it's maybe just a bootstrap and not a final end state.

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