I certainly hope we don't rely only on satellites, in case of a solar flare that destroys all the satellites.
> Researchers in Switzerland have transmitted and received optical data at rates of more than 10 Tbit/s between an Alpine peak and an observatory at the University of Bern – a distance of 53 kilometres. This is more than five times further than would be needed to set up a satellite-to-ground communication link
Google says Starlink satellites are 550km in altitude... Is this to do with turbulence below 10km?
The round-trip speed of light to a geosync orbit is 239ms, but some of these LEO sats are already sitting as close as a 4ms round-trip away, and there have been proposals for some even closer.
Would a Solar Flare wrap around the earth?
Or are Solar Flares so massive they would envelop the earth, like dunking a globe in cosmic lava?
Or do they go on long enough that the earth would rotate and all sides of the globe would be exposed?
Or do Satellites whizz around the earth fast enough that they would travel through the path of the Solar Flare?
Probably hilariously odd questions, but I have no idea! :-)