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Starlink Is a Big Deal

sneak.berlin

361–365 of 365 posts

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#361
post #316
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>people have already built most of those microwave tower paths here on earth I can assure you that lucrative paths like New York-London and New York-Tokyo have not been built yet. In fact, the vast majority of lucrative trading paths have not been built yet due to geographical restrictions. Yes, fiber optic links exist, but those only go up to 0.7c. To a trading firm, the choice between a satellite link that does ~0.…

That all depends on Starlink supporting point to point inside their network. Also that path will be more zig-zaggy than the great circle fiber path and importantly will vary during the day as the satellite tracks shift relative to earth. [0] [0] Unless their in a harmonic orbit I guess not 100% sure abou that one. There should always be some jitter in the connection time just from the satellites moving even if their…

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Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a first-principles perspective, it's baffling to me why this would ever be a serious problem. We know the ephemerides of all objects in Earth orbit, and they are traveling at a fast enough angular speed to not linger in an observational spot. We're not working with long-exposure film here - we can manipulate pixels over time. On a technical level it should be trivial to mask out the pixels where satellites are l…

We don't want to manipulate pixels; the goal is not to produce pretty pictures of known things. The goal is to collect as much data as possible about things which are not well understood (because, in part, of a lack of data), especially those that are time-varying on short human timescales. The objects in question are often extremely faint, and even if one knows a lot of the details of periodic noise, removing the no…

I understand the goal is not pretty pictures. But you're not using a hammer to remove random white noise from all your observations, you're using a scalpel to mask out completely predictable errors for very short periods of time. My amateur astronomer link was not meant as a scientific how-to, but as an illustration that even simple hammer-y methods work to mask out satellite trails.

There are very few non-periodic events in the universe that happen over the fraction-of-a-second timescale for which a satellite occludes an area of the sky, the linking of EM to gravitational wave events being perhaps the only notable exception. Meteor impacts on planets happen over the course of seconds. Supernovae occur over the timeframe of hours. Glitches in millisecond pulsars (the millisecond name notwithstanding) occur over the timescale of days.

This is also the issue with using occlusion by the sun and moon as analogy - their occlusions do operate on the timescale of interesting astronomical events. If the moon whipped around the Earth at the same rate as LEO satellites it might occlude Jupiter, but you would have plenty of vision between the shutters to reconstruct events on the timescales we are interested in. I'll also note that the analogy breaks down with the focus on objects in the solar system since they all roughly lie on the ecliptic - you've reduced the occlusions over a 2D sky to occlusions between objects that live on a 1D slice of it. The Sun and Moon both take up 0.3% of the angular diameter of the sky, but only 0.001% the angular area.

Are you losing real data with a sky full of 10's of thousands of LEO satellites? Yes. Is it a significant amount? Not by any reasonable metric. Is it over a significant timescale? No.

An analogy: If you have some video footage and for whatever reason have a punchhole in the corner of every 100th frame, that by no means precludes you from doing analysis on the video. I'd expect the video conservationists to be up in arms about any blemishes on their original film, but I'd argue that that is the position from aesthetics. To answer questions such as "how many times does the ball in this video bounce" or "how does the lighting in this video change over time" or "how does that person's hair react to the wind visible in the video" the hole is insignificant to obtaining the answer, even if the area of interest is directly covered every 100th frame.

I'll close with the acknowledgement that radio interference is a legitimate concern here. But satellites are hardly the only emitters which are increasing in number at an increasing rate, and that commons will be polluted whether we launch them or not.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not if society is generally structured around that, sure. But if the only way to find out what your homework is is a website, and that homework is posted as a multimegabyte PDF (this is how it's working for my kids, not a hypothetical), then lack of an available internet connection immediately affects your ability to effectively attend school, for example. Now we can have a discussion about whether school is nec…

Or more fundamentally, a discussion on whether pdf's on websites are necessary for school work?

Clearly not, if people are willing to hand out the same thing on paper. But they're not, for various reasons..

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, this is pretty cool! Looks like a bunch should be visible on Saturday from LA. I’ll definitely be keeping a lookout!

Good luck with that with the light pollution from LA.

They are bright enough to be visible.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#365

> * For reference, my last flat in Berlin (the capital of the largest economy in the EU), on the ground on a main street in the city center, was serviced with approximately 14MBps ADSL, and this was the fastest offering available from any vendor.* That seems really low to me. I was under the impression that Europe had generally better internet access than in the US. Comcast delivers much better speeds than that even…

It has. I have 100mb/s in Berlin. Seems that his street is not connected well, or he lives too far away from the distribution node, there is also 1gb/s cable in some streets.

The location in question was in Skalitzer Strasse, only 50-100m from Lausitzer Platz and Görlitzer Park.

I had better connectivity to Freifunk via their churchtower hub in Lausitzer Platz than I did to the actual internet.

You'd think something that central would be better connected, especially directly along the U1. Oh well.

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