Comment on A million new SpaceX satellites will destroy the night sky — for everyone on Earth
4am@lemmy.zip 1 day agoIf you have the capability to build a laser that can focus enough energy, from the ground through the atmosphere, with enough precision to lock on to an LEO constellation member long enough to disable it, you’d probably already either be captured, or working for DoD.
Also: great, you exploded it before reentry. Now we have a hundred thousand smaller, lighter fragments skipping off the atmosphere, disbursing randomly, and spinning around like hypersonic chaff bullets for actual worthwhile spacecraft and satellites to fly through, twinkling in infrared like a billion new streaky sparkles on those telescopes. It takes a lot longer for all that bullshit to rain down, and it pollutes just the same. Tell me, who were you fighting for again and why?
This is like when the humans blacken the sky in the Matrix to defeat the machines. Yeah it wrecked the earth, but is also didn’t defeat them and they just found something else to exploit.
teyrnon@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I mean I was trying to Broach a theoretical, completely academic, discussion about what could or could not take these satellites out.
zalgotext@sh.itjust.works 23 hours ago
And you were given a quite thorough explanation of why “but what if really BIG laser?” is a bad idea
teyrnon@sh.itjust.works 23 hours ago
Yes for the guerilla, but not a reason for why someone not afraid of air power would use one.