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.
Every government is running on fumes.
I appreciate the fact-check!
Yet you didnt bother doing it after reading, let alone before posting misinformation
I’m in the space industry and I can tell you that anyone pretending to be an authority on orbital mechanics on the internet is full of shit. I’ve taken entire classes called “advanced orbital mechanics.” That shit is wildly hard, vaguely inaccurate, and so slow that you can only do it effectively on a computer. Even then you have to decide which variables to throw out because you if you use them all you won’t be able to calculate predictions on every satellite in time for them to be useful. Then you have to take the predictions, predict how wrong they are, and predict again based on those predictions if two satellites will run into each other.
The truth is that nobody knows if Kessler Syndrome is even real. I personally fall on the side of thinking it’s nonsense, there are too many variables that would have to go wrong all at once. It’s like being worried about winning the lottery. There have been multiple catastrophic on orbit conjunctions that have created thousands of pieces of debris. Still no Kessler Syndrome. Even in a nightmare scenario I can only see it affecting one orbital regime. The odds of Starlink effecting the orbit that GPS is in is effectively not possible. But this is not a solved field and I am not remotely an expert, I’m just tired of people who don’t know a thing about the field thinking they’re experts because they have a JWST desktop wallpaper and have 300 hours in KSP. The real experts are ancient old men and women who have been doing orbital predictions for 40 years and I’ve seen them get into yelling matches about this sort of thing.
This post got away from me but the point is this shit is so involved it effectively can’t be fact checked because you could come to whatever conclusion you want.
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.
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.
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.
You can’t produce methane from CO2 for free. It requires extremely high pressures and then you have to add in as much as energy as you would get out of burning the methane to make methane from scratch.
SpaceX’s launch facility, where they’d likely try this stupid process, is in Texas. Texas gets most of its electricity from burning fossil fuels. So unless spaceX makes a private nuclear reactor on site to power the methane manufacturing plant, they’ll be burning fossil fuels to make electricity so they can turn C02 back into a fossil fuel. That’s not carbon neutral
They’ll probably build a solar farm.
But don’t get me started on how there no such thing as carbon neutral because it took carbon to build the solar panels, or wind mills, and the person operating the facility had to eat vegetables which required someone to ship them, which required a EV which required power that came from solar but those solar panels which were made from panels produced via solar panels required someone else to clean them which produced co2 making their meals too!
The launch facility they have in Boca Chica is surrounded by wildlife preserves, where are they going to put a solar farm big enough for a usable methane plant?
To put it in perspective, a square meter of solar panel puts out about 200 watts.
At atmospheric pressure, a cubic meter of methane gas contains about 40 million joules of energy.
40 million/200 = 200,000 square meters of solar panels needed to produce a cubic meter of methane.
And that’s assuming the process is 100% efficient. It’s also not counting the energy needed for the pumps to pressurize plant, or the methods they would use to extract or move the carbon dioxide, or cool down the methane.
That 40million joule figure is for gaseous methane, starship needs liquid methane to run, so the methane would need to be cooled with industrial refrigeration to turn it into fuel, which adds even more energy to the equation.
For the amount of fuel Starship needs, the Sabatier process is not feasible if you’re doing it with solar panels and planning on launching more than once a year or so. Not unless they want to pave over a small city with solar panels.
Putting energy back into CO2 to get fuel is not really economically feasible. It’s a useful process for mars for example, because you can drop off the plant and have it trickle fuel into a launch vehicle while you build the base and wait for the crew to arrive.
Boca Chica isn’t going to be the main launch center in the future due to things like the wildlife preserve around it. They’re going to be restricted at some point. It’s a R&D center.
They could also build the solar/wind elsewhere to offset anything, or maybe they could even invest in a SMR. They’ll have the cash once those start coming online.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re investing money to optimize the process as well, just like we see new advances in desalination continually making it more efficient. (Edit: e.g https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.35848/1347-4065/ace831)
Also even in Texas, it isn’t going to be coal forever, more and more renewable sources are being added to the grid every year. I’m not trying to say this will be an immediate thing.
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.
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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.
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.
Some of these people haven’t heard of ORM and it shows.
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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.
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.
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.
That’s one of the problems with Internet access being provided by private corporations. They’re never going to service those people, because it’s not profitable to run a hundred miles of fiber for one guy in Wyoming, unless he’s crazy rich and pays for it himself. It’s the same issue the mail has, one of the many reasons the USPS is so important
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Fiber once it’s installed requires effectively no maintenance and it will last indefinitely until physically broken. Copper corrodes and wears out, but glass will last longer than the people who install it or the people who enjoy its use. Satellite internet from LEO requires many rocket launches per year to sustain, meanwhile fiber means rolling a truck (which is usually relatively local) anywhere a backhoe or flood or digging animal has broken it every few months or years, and these trucks are already rolling to install and maintain all of the existing services (or install new ones)
No, many are not on the power grid.
We tried to run fiber everywhere in the US, spent billions of dollars, but it still didn’t get built.
Actually it’s been working brilliantly, it’s just there’s so much of the United States to Unite with fiber that it’s taking time and continued investment. It used to be you couldn’t find fiber anywhere, now most of the farming communities I live around have at least some fiber services and it keeps growing every year. My in-laws just this month were notified they have the option to change from their 8/1mbit DSL to gigabit fiber, and they live in the boonies outside of a town of 500 nobodies ever heard of.
Seems we’re getting to where the next big hurdle is less rural fiber and more suburbs. I literally have significantly better internet options after moving to a small town of 10000 or so than my parents do in the suburbs of the capital city of the state.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The speed of light in optic fiber cables is also only 2/3 the speed of light in vacuum (aka: space).
Starlink’s end form is meant to get billions from charging intercontinental high frequency traders for a split second advantage.
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.
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.
That is not a viable market. It’s far too small for the cost.
And they can’t compete. It’s all backed by investor money. It’s the same disruption business that big tech has been doing for decades. Enter market, subsidize costs with investor money, become incumbent as everyone thinks it’s such a good deal. Raise prices when there’s no other option.
Uber, netflix, Spotify, same plan again. Never better, never competitive, just disruptive.
The government is also broken, the US invested billions of dollars for nation wide fiber, and it still didn’t get built.
“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.
ah yes, the “you used flowery language to make a point and thus I’ll decide that everything you said is wrong!” technique
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/acf40c
unfortunately Scientists have no power, so they are basically begging these companies to work with them to find solutions and the companies just aren’t doing that. The best they can do is twice the maximum brightness scientists have called for, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-01238-3 estimates there could be 100,000 of these objects in the sky in the 2030s, 30x the amount we have currently.
astronomy is massively impacted by all of this, just because America refuses to build infrastructure like everyone else does, thanks America. Thanks Musk.
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
Okay then how come the internet isn’t wired up globally. 2023 and there are still places without
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.
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
In some EU countries, Australia, new Zealand, and the UK those initial networks were rolled out as government departments so the government did not expect an initial return.
Fun thing, the Australian and UK telephone networks were rolled out under the direction of the postal services before being split off to their own departments.
Since the 80s most western governments are trying to sell off assets under the guise of Privation so we are very unlikely to see another initiative like it. There have been exceptions like the Australian National Broadband Network but those are planned to be broken up and sold again anyway.
Then why do they feel right to complain?
Because when a company is not making enough money it is not the fault of sales not meeting expectations, it is the fault of government regulations and administration costs.
Seems like we can’t go a week between inaccurate posts complaining about Starlink getting traction
It’s almost as if a small percentage of Lemmy posts are generated with chatGPT to supply content.
Still better than the not-so-small percentage on Reddit… 🤷
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.
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 think I’ve usually seen internet run with the telephone wires in rural areas rather than in trenches.
It looks like the study they linked only addresses the CO2 produced by the satellites, and not the land based providers.
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.
So you don’t know either?
How do the other satellite competitors even matter here?
They produce similar amounts of carbon, have similar bandwidth, similar # of satellites, and are for a similar demographic.
Edit: they’re just not owned by Elon Musk so no one talks about them.
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.
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.
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
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: https://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 for Elon’s personal reasons, 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. Obviously could be even better, but its actually helping real people.
Spain isn’t the market for Starlink.
Try something a little more rural.
Are you even serious? Maybe try looking at a map of spain, there are plenty of rural areas that are loosing population and leaving old towns completely deserted because they lack internet connection and are hours away from any relevant city and shops, you can read about the empty Spain https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/22/empty-spain-government-urged-to-act-as-towns-fade-from-map with a simple search instead of trying to talk about stuff you dont even know, also btw, conectate 35 is the same concept as starlink, which is satellite driven internet for rural areas, but its way cheaper, sustainable and isnt managed by a piece of shit. https://interactive.guim.co.uk/uploader/embed/2019/04/spain_pop-zip/giv-3902luNkorAsXraI/Spanish-population-change-inArticle_620.png
for example in spain: https://conectate35.es/ where they have internet for 35 euros a month, in any part of the territory with 100mbps download speed
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map of spain, there are plenty of rural areas that are loosing population and leaving old towns completely deserted because they lack internet connection
Pick one or the other, you’re literally arguing both sides of the fence here.
Is it really hard to read and understand that the government is launching this kind of operations with small internet providers and hispasat so people stop having to leave the rural side of spain from lacking access to internet?
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
Article without paywall: https://archive.ph/ESiXk
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.
