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Comment by pier25 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if Starlink will eventually have on impact on this, maybe 10 years from now.

Some years ago we lived in an off the grid cabin in the mountains of Veracruz (Mexico) and the lack of connectivity was by far the main reason we left. We now live on the outskirts of a small city but I still really miss the absolute silence of living away from civilization.

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Yup, that will be one less reason to live in a city. I've also theorized that work from home and self-driving vehicles are other trends that may counteract the trend towards urban living. If you have a self-driving vehicle (on the highway at least), longer commutes may be less of an issue if you can work, read, or watch tv (we're not there yet.) If you work from home, commute doesn't matter at all.

That being said, I work from home, but I live in downtown to have easy access to activities, restaurants, and supermarkets without needing a car. The difference in rent is dwarfed by not having the cost or hassle of a vehicle.

>self-driving vehicle (on the highway at least)

I live about an hour outside a major city. I definitely will drive in (normally) for activities like theater. With a self-driving car--even just on the highways--I'd be more inclined to go in for an early evening get-together. But I wouldn't be popping in multiple times a week even if I didn't mostly need to drive myself.

If the population is truly zero, I wonder how many other infrastructure concerns will come first? Primarily road connections, but also electric grid and potable water. There are alternatives to the latter 2 but it is a significant impact

In many places, a well is a relatively easy way to get water. Electricity is trickier, but solar panels and batteries/inverter can be reasonable.

Climate change will have the opposite effect. Both worsening extreme and unexpected weather and the high carbon cost of geographically remote living will consolidate people to where the infrastructure is.

If you're going to live remotely I think it would be an easy choice to install solar. The US is very good for solar in general, compared to Europe. Also many of these wide open areas are also great for wind power.

And what "extreme and unexpected weather" are you talking about? Climate change has increased the severity of hurricanes but I've heard nothing about tornados which is all you would have to worry about. The western parts have to worry about fires to some extent, but that's not a problem for the eastern parts (even intentional fires put themselves out). Also even in the western parts, it's hard to create a firestorm without trees, a simple fire break can stop many grass fires.

I am betting that Starlink will have an impact on where people live. We have tons of beautiful empty land in this country but, modern life requires broadband and that's not well distributed yet.

We have tons of beautiful empty land in this country

It's beautiful because it is empty.

I think we should fill up all the vacant lots and surface parking in the cities before we needlessly trample nature any more.

Agreed, but also...

There's like SO MUCH empty land. Growing up in the US, I thought the most empty things got was Ohio. But turns out, we're more like Russia - with the empty siberian frontier - than we are like the UK or something.

If everyone were evenly distributed, we'd still have <100 people per sq mile

Ohio has about the same overall population density as Spain.

You should take a trip to Australia sometime. The desert is sparse. Australia is more like an atoll, with everyone living on the edges. I've been in parts of the outback where my workmates and I were the only people for 10 to 100's of km's in every direction.

Isn't Perth the city that's farthest away from any other city in the world? Obviously that depends on the criteria which I can't remember, but the people I know from there have all complained that if you're bored of the city it's almost as easy to go to another country as it is to go to another city in Australia.

If you're still so far apart that you can't see your neighbors it's still "empty". The amount of space available in the United States boggles the mind when you actually go out there and drive for hours seeing almost no one. The damage to nature comes from large industrial activities like farming (fields or trees) or strip mining. Simply living there would actually help preserve that wilderness.

i use to wonder how you could detonate a nuclear bomb and no one notice, then I drove through New Mexico. The shear amount of nothing is hard to put in words. I spend a lot of time in far West Texas and Brewster county seems like beehive of activity compared to New Mexico.

My knee jerk reaction was to comment that modern life also requires other things like healthcare; but then I thought twice in that maybe some of the lifestyle diseases that drive in some measure the important placed on healthcare availability, maybe those core maladies and deleterious choices are encouraged by living in close proximity to large numbers of folks.

Which "lifestyle diseases" are you thinking of? Both obesity and diabetes are markedly more common in rural America compared to urban America, but there is a confounding factor of poverty.

Poverty is one thing. In a rural location, indeed, even in many suburban locations, you also sort of have to make yourself go out for a walk/run/hike because you're not going to just organically walk from place to place. (ADDED: Aside from house/yard work/farming/etc.) I live in a semi-rural location (nothing like what we're talking about here) and there is basically no reason that I have to do more than a minimum level of walking on a given day. (Leaving aside how big a difference that makes in the scheme of things.)

Yeah, I think there is no question that there are ways to integrate physical activity into your life in a rural setting, especially if you are going to make gardening, animal husbandry, or forestry integral to your routine. But, if you think that Starlink is a big inducement to move to the great deserts of western America, where you will sit with your laptop and your wifi, then it seems likely to be a net reduction in your physical activity, as you won't be walking a mile each way to the office, or to the café, or whatever.

Food is a much bigger factor than exercise.

(if you do physical work 10 hours a day maybe not, but walking a couple miles is a smallish breakfast)

Driving a couple hundred miles twice or once a year for dentist appointments isn't that hard. Yeah if you injure yourself badly you're just going to die, but that's kind of expected.

At the end of the day, everyone gets old and starts falling apart. That's when you need to be near specialists.

Highly likely. I do wonder what impact this will have on mail ordering. Currently rural deliveries are subsidized by the more densely populated areas. Because the ratio of subsidized rural dwellers to densely populated area dwellers is so lopsided in favor of density, the subsidy doesn't matter much. If that ratio changes, so might the economics of companies like Amazon being able to deliver anywhere, usually by piggybacking on the USPS's rural delivery infrastructure. That said, I've seen Amazon's own delivery vans in some pretty low density rural areas so maybe it works out somehow.

I doubt it. Most of the blocks near me are not areas you could legally inhabit (.e.g. state and federal lands) and in some of the other places I understand it looks like large ranches that are far from the nearest grocery store (or paved road) and are marginal farm land.

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