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Comment by thereisnospork | Hacker News Reader

Parisians hated the Eiffel tower when it went up, claimed it was an eyesore. Give it a few years, and these constellations will be something we look up at with pride and aesthetic appreciation.

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It's not about aesthetics, if you keep adding satellites with extremely high density, at some point you run out of gaps in the sky, that are dark enough and unobstructed for long enough time to make any meaningful measurements of the observable universe.

This overstates the problem I think. It will be an issue for wide-field astronomy. On the other hand, even with tens of thousands of satellites, they will only be covering a tiny fraction of the sky. For narrow-field you should be unobstructed most of the time, and able to turn the sensor off momentarily when the odd satellite is going to obstruct you.

> This overstates the problem I think. It will be an issue for wide-field astronomy.

I think you are downplaying the problem. They are already reporting issues with Starlinks and there are "only" a few hundred of them right now, Amazon wants to deploy 3k low orbiting satellites.

Look at this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronomical_observato...

The very large majority of the world's observatories are doing wide-field astronomy.

This is not scientific progress, this is just two billionaires trying to one up each other and muscling their way around the world to rub their egos.

> This is not scientific progress, this is just two billionaires trying to one up each other and muscling their way around the world to rub their egos.

Starlink claims to have other objectives. Why do you think their stated objectives are dishonest?

Internet service is a solved problem, you have transoceanic cables and distribution networks which garantee reliable, high bandwith, internet service.

This is a gimmick to sell the imaginary joy that you can go anywhere remotely and enjoy the pleasures of the modern connected world. There are already niche providers for Satellite services that users can use, if they are truly isolated and are able to afford internet.

There is no sense in having all of this infrastructure duplicated and done via RF transmission over a low-orbiting constellation (with all the losses and realibility issues around it), if it can easily be achieved through expanding the existing infrastructure.

The only use-cases that this serves are high-income people that want to go off-grid but are unwilling to sacrifice high-bandwith, and military deployments (Which SpaceX does not hide as an objective).

Very bright, enough to contaminate all frames, and rapidly moving: have fun doing long exposures to spot faint objects most visible in twilight with those options. Maybe starlink is actually a sneaky way to up the Mars mission priority by mucking up the near earth object searches? /s

Starlink satellites are only visible on the horizon during dawn/dusk, because they are in the earths shadow the rest of the night.

There's a big difference between a landmark and polluting the entire planet's night sky with thousands of reflective satellites.

Other than scale I really don't see the difference between '''desicrating''' a skyline with ugly[0] architecture and starlink et al.

Sure some architecture stays ugly - but preserving the aesthetics of a sky(line) ranks really low on my list of things that are worth stopping progress over.

It's not primarily about aesthetics, but about the ability to do fundamental science. Ugly buildings don't obstruct observation of the universe.

Obviously they obstruct it a bit, but generally in places you don't try to do any astronomy anyway. The real innovation of Starlink is cutting the link to the start over the almost the entirety of the Earths surface, true market disruptor move right there.

Except they aren’t visible in the night sky. They are in super low orbits, meaning they are in the earths shadow at night, and only have sunlight to reflect during dawn/dusk, when they are usually low in the horizon.

Give me your address and I'll come and plant a light sculpture in your backyard for free. You don't get to choose anyways. At first, you'll think it's an eyesore but give it a few years and you'll learn to look at it with pride and aesthetic appreciation.

Yes, some initially hated things became loved. From this it does not follow that one can expect that to be the norm.

Unpopular opinion and I don't want to degrade the probably most prominent landmark of Paris, but it is quite ugly.

It distracts from better objects like the Louvre and others.

Fuck that. The stars are more beautiful than any shit they put up there.

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