Starlink

Comments

• lgstarn@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I hate Elon maybe even more than the next guy, but there are some major exaggerations here:

  Starlink makes tons of maneuvers to avoid collisions: https://www.space.com/starlink-satellite-conjunction-increase-threatens-space-sustainability

  Starlink is at an orbit that they are quickly returning to Earth and burning up on re-entry: https://cybernews.com/news/starlink-lost-200-satellites/

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  • schwim@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Sadly, it seems both sides of any discussion have now mastered hyperbole, manipulating statistics, leaving out facts and stretching the truth to make their argument. You basically can’t believe anything you read any longer.

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    • OrteilGenou@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I think ‘mastered’ might be a bit of… dear god.

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    • iHUNTcriminals@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Every government is running on fumes.

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  • Masimatutu@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I appreciate the fact-check!

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    • synceDD@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Yet you didnt bother doing it after reading, let alone before posting misinformation

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  • FrostKing@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    If there’s anything I’ve noticed using Lemmy for news (before that I didn’t really have a general news source) it’s that the headline is always wrong, and the article almost always corrects it—but all of the comments are about always just people who read the headline and act as if it’s gospel with even reading the article.

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    • BrockSampson@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      If the sites didn’t put it all beyond pay walls it might remedy that problem a little bit. Force people to jump through hoops just to read shit journalism and they will do the easier thing: debate headlines.

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• Ducks@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Elon Musk is a total fool and an idiot, but like others said, this article is hogwash. The satellites do not pose a risk for Kessler Syndrome due to their LEO. They will fall to earth and burn up. They also maneuver to avoid collisions. It is highly unlikely to contribute anything at all to Kessler Syndrome.

  Additionally, how are they comparing carbon footprint? Article is behind paywall. The internet infrastructure on earth didn’t pop into existence out of thin air, carbon neutral. The trucks and ships used to lay wire, the mining and manufacturing of everything involved in the process, creates carbon for both. The carbon that would be created to provide access to rural areas as an alternative. If you are going to count the carbon to make and fuel spaceships, you must also count the carbon to make the ships that lay and maintain undersea cables and trucks that maintain cable on land.

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  • Tb0n3@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Even if they’re in low earth orbit an impact could spread pieces into higher orbit due to the energies involved. That could in turn impact other satellites at a higher orbit and just keep going.

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    • troyunrau@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Quantum mechanics also says that all the air in my lungs could collapse to a single point, but on the grand scale, these things don’t happen. Risk analysis requires evaluation of probabilities.

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    • Ducks@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      It is very improbable that there will be a collision caused by a starlink satellite. While Musk is certainly an idiot who can’t be trusted, there are intelligent people who work for SpaceX who have considered all this and more before launching their satellites.

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• al4s@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I’d like you all to consider that places where you’d use starlink are also significantly more than 30x farther away from civilization than the average land-based internet user.

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  • rizoid@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Out in middle of nowhere Ohio, the only options are satellite and I’ll be damned if I’m doing to give Dish or Hughes net more money for worse speeds. Starlink is it until they actually run fiber out here.

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  • ThePantser@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Are those places connected to the power grid? If yes then there is no reason they can’t have fiber Internet. If we can electrify we can internetify.

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    • navi@lemmy.tespia.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Definitely, that’s what we should do. But that will have a decent carbon footprint and more importantly our government (at least in the US) has utterly failed rural Americans (and more!) in terms of internet roll out.

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    • Ducks@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Think of all the pollution that will be caused running new fiber cable to bumblefuck nowhere so 1 additional person or family can access the internet. It doesn’t make any more sense than Starlink, much less sense at that.

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    • ghterve@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      No, many are not on the power grid.

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    • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      We tried to run fiber everywhere in the US, spent billions of dollars, but it still didn’t get built.

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• Trainguyrom@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Fact is, satellite internet from low earth orbit is the best solution in some parts of the world, and the ones to blame are literally the exact ISPs it’s competing with by providing service to the underserved. It’s a necessary option in providing the constant connectivity out society expects and relies upon (whether or not intermittent outages should be acceptable is a different discussion)

  I would love to see some legislation requiring satellite ISPs to share infrastructure so we don’t have 3 incompatible competing services with duplicated but not necessarily redundant infrastructure. That would be a far more useful goal to push for

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• Cosmos7349@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  So I don’t really like the idea of defending anything related to Musk, but it’s kind of poor form to compare emissions between Starlink and land-based internet imo. Although they are the same product, they are targeted at completely different users, from what I understand.

  Starlink should always be a more expensive and slower technology just because of communication distance, so it shouldnt really be able to compete with land-based solutions (except where telecom is reeeeeally fucking people on price). Starlink is really meant more for edge-cases where telecorps refuse to build infrastructure.

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  • player2@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Not only this, but StarLink is a new and rapidly growing service so the number of subscribers is still on a steep upward trend. Comparing carbon/subscriber is going to be inaccurate right now due to the low number of starlink subscribers compared to a more established utility with a stable number of users. StarLink also has more new infrastructure needed than an established utility.

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  • sfgifz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Use cases and costs aside, we should still be open to discussing the pros and cons of these business ventures on the planet. Musk isn’t going to pay up to clean up any mess caused by this, it would be taxes and price hikes around the world in the name of going green and reducing climate impact that get paid by plebs like us.

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  • echo64@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Starlink isn’t meant for the edge cases, the edge cases can not make it profitable. The edge cases are edge cases.

    Also blotting out the sky with wasteful satalites isn’t a good solution to “the free market wont build infrastructure because its broken.” Its just another aspect of it being broken and the entire planet has to suffer from it.

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    • Cosmos7349@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I am not super well-researched on this, so I might be mistaken, but their market is people who don’t have access to telecom infrastructure, no? I guess it’s not an edge-case just because there are that many people without access? Because I don’t see how they’d be able to compete on price/value with traditional internet providers.

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    • ghterve@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      “blotting out the sky” is hyperbole and not reality. Those pics of the trains of dots in the sky are temporary and only present in the handful of days after a launch.

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    • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The government is also broken, the US invested billions of dollars for nation wide fiber, and it still didn’t get built.

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  • jarfil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Starlink should always be a more expensive and slower technology just because of communication distance

    That is not correct. The target of Starlink is satellite-to-satellite data routing in as close to a straight line as possible between point A and point B. Even adding the 500Km up and 500Km down, starting at several 1000Kms that’s less distance than going through the network of ground fiber cables.

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• lemmefixdat4u@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  In order to do what Starlink does, it would take laying millions of miles of cable or hundreds of thousands of cell towers. People need Internet options with better than a couple of Mb of bandwidth, and without draconian usage caps of a few tens of gigabytes. Without space-based systems, it’s economically unfeasible to service large areas with few customers. What do you think the carbon footprint of laying cable to a few remote islands is? Who is going to pay for that boondoggle? Starlink makes it economically possible.

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  • FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    You’re saying we have to fuck up the Earth one way or another so we might as well use rockets to do it?

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    • jarfil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      “We” have no say in it, the guys with private islands who want to “work from home” while forcing their employees into useless offices, are going to fuck up the Earth… so this way they do it a tiny bit less.

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  • crashoverride@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    It’s not economically possible unless it’s environmentally conscience as well

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• buzz86us@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Okay then how come the internet isn’t wired up globally. 2023 and there are still places without

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  • slazer2au@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    As with everything it is because of money.

    From a business point of view why should I spend $1,000 per quarter mile to install a fibre cable that will make maybe $120/month in revenue so my profit per service is maybe $30-$40/m

    This is a vastly oversimplified as there are multiplexing technologies like GPON to lower the cost per mile but then there are support costs for faults, backhaul and internet exchange point costs I have to pay.

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    • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      We did it with electricity and telephone service about 100-200 years ago depending on where you look. We can do it again with a technology that literally can share cables with telephone and electricity

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    • buzz86us@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Then why do they feel right to complain?

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• Player2@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Seems like we can’t go a week between inaccurate posts complaining about Starlink getting traction

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  • DizzoMyNizzo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    It’s almost as if a small percentage of Lemmy posts are generated with chatGPT to supply content.

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    • jarfil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Still better than the not-so-small percentage on Reddit… 🤷

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• BB69@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  You know, I would think a progressive community would want to expand internet access to all (which is what Starlink does), so I’m kinda surprised there’s resistance every time it’s brought up.

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  • Rayston@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    You would think a progressive community would look at ALL the factors of such an endeavor and analyze them in a real world setting taking into account all the various variables.

    Instead of focusing on ONE positive and acting as if all the negatives are automatically outweighed by that one positive.

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    • haltowork@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Instead of focusing on ONE positive and acting as if all the negatives are automatically outweighed by that one positive.

      i.e. elon muk bad

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  • stormesp@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    First, you really need to look at the definition of progressive, because its for sure not: “being in favour of bringing tech to more people people even if it has disastrous consequences for everyone else”. Second, there are other people doing way better job at expanding internet access to everyone, for example in spain: conectate35.es where they have internet for 35 euros a month, in any part of the territory with 100mbps download speed without needing to clog the space with new satellites, without needing to be constantly building new rockets, without making the pockets of Elon even larger. That is something that is actually bringing internet to actual people that needs it at a reasonable price, with the state paying for the equipment and installation in most cases.

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    • BB69@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Spain isn’t the market for Starlink.

      Try something a little more rural.

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• AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  It looks like the study they linked only addresses the CO2 produced by the satellites, and not the land based providers.

  From the study: Another interesting thing is that OneWeb and Kuiper (competing satellite internet services) are estimated to have significantly more per-user emissions than Starlink (40-200% more emissions!) (keep in mind that Starlink is predicted to have the most users) while also being estimated to provide a worse service and be more expensive per user. (all taken from the charts on page 6)

  They also mention that Starship will likely lower carbon emissions of later Starlink launches significantly.

  I’m not quite sure how the much larger Starlink V2 design factors in to all of this, or if they even took it into account.

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  • Sethayy@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    So you don’t know either?

    How do the other satellite competitors even matter here?

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    • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      They produce similar amounts of carbon, have similar bandwidth, similar # of satellites, and are for a similar demographic.

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• banana_meccanica@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  They just don’t care. If they could earn a trillion knowing that the gain would destroy the planet in 10 years, they would. They’re out of control, and the states on their knees to beg their money.

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• JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I’m actually surprised internet takes 3% the amount of energy it takes to get to space just to run some internet wires. I’d have thought it would be much much lower than that.

  But also, starlink completes with geostationary satellite and home cellular connection more than internet over wires. Or even people who didn’t have an option before.

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  • Fogle@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    It also says per subscriber of which I assume there are significantly more regular internet users than Starlink

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  • Turun@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Did your intuition consider the energy required to dig a trench to bury the cale in? Or putting up posts to lift the cable off the ground? I didn’t consider it at first, but neither is done with climate neutral machinery.

    The operational requirements are probably pretty similar, the satellites are obviously exclusively solar powered, so no contribution there.

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    • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Yeah I did, but cities where most of the internet users are have very short runs, and the cabling is usually installed with the building. Also, I’ve usually seen internet run with the telephone wires in rural areas rather than in trenches.

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• cricket97@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  It’s hilarious watching lemmy’s hatred for elon musk turn them into luddites

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• PissinSelfNdriveway@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  My Internet here is like 1-3 Mbps if I’m lucky because I have 2 shitty options. Launch some more of these fuckers up there so I can has useful Internet.

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  • Cethin@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    How about we encourage more competition or make it state owned instead?

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    • TORFdot0@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Starling isn’t competing with terrestrial ISPs, it’s competing with other sat-isps and WISPs which will never get better internet otherwise.

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    • PissinSelfNdriveway@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Make it owned by the people responsible for us having shit Internet to start with. Brilliant, what could go wrong?

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    • PissinSelfNdriveway@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Make it owned by the people responsible for us having shit Internet to start with. Brilliant, what could go wrong?

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• Masimatutu@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  link without paywall

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• kSPvhmTOlwvMd7Y7E@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Hm that’s pretty misleading. 4G is an order of magnitude more power hungry than your wifi, and nobody blames them for it?

  Why suddenly Muskrat is the problem?

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• Deftdrummer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  This sub needs a fuckin identity already.

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