Pictures, Videos, Articles showing just how boring it is to live in a dystopic society, or with signs of a dystopic society.
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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/
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.
I think 'mastered' might be a bit of... dear god.
Meanwhile in marketing class ...kids are mastering how to make profit with it.
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.
Spoiler: It's 0.1 tonnes of CO2e per subscriber per year. This is not mentioned in the article.
This includes for example the emissions generated in the course of constructing the rockets that launch the satellites. So far it's unclear to me whether, when comparing to terrestrial telecom, they include e.g. the emissions produced when manufacturing the trucks that deploy the infrastructure.
This also means the amount of emissions per user will go down the more users they get. It’s not very fair to compare something new to something that’s been around for decades in something that is based solely on the amount of users they have. I hate starlink, but this report is trash.
Emissions are going to go down when starship is made as well.
Starship uses a methane + oxygen fuel which burns cleaner, and can be produced with just water and CO2 making it carbon neutral.
I don't think every flight will be neutral immediately, or what % will be consistently once its scaled up, but it'll be better.
But 1 carbon neutral flight sending up hundreds of satellites will bring it down quickly. They could even save the carbon neutral flights for themselves for PR purposes.
Additionally, existing users are mostly in urban centers with very efficient infrastructure, starlink gives high bandwidth internet everywhere.
I'd like to see the CO2e cost of giving a user in the middle of Idaho or Montana a 100Mbps connection.
Thank you, I was wondering how high the emissions could possibly be for Internet access from the customer's perspective. I figured simply owning a car probably smashed even "30x as much" as other ISPs
They almost certainly do not. Embodied energy is conveniently ignored 99% of the time because a) awareness of how much carbon goes into everything could result in consumers consuming less — couldn't possibly do the almighty economy dirty like that — and b) it's extremely difficult to calculate with any reasonable degree of accuracy.
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. The SpaceX ships are largely reusable as well, so the carbon to make the ships also needs to be split among its voyages to space just as a ship at sea makes multiple trips.
It's like giving billionaires access to do reckless shit that can literally impact humanity's future may be problematic.
Wow
But come on, think about all the jobs it created!
A handjob is still a job, officer!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Seems like we can't go a week between inaccurate posts complaining about Starlink getting traction
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.
It also says per subscriber of which I assume there are significantly more regular internet users than Starlink
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.
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.
You're saying we have to fuck up the Earth one way or another so we might as well use rockets to do it?
"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.
It's not economically possible unless it's environmentally conscience as well
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.
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.
