Everything always does, but with a cheap battery from Lowes I now have Internet everywhere I go for $60/month beamed to me from space. I'm good with it.
Not everything behaves 30 times worse in some (important) metric than the previous model. "T'is how it is" is a very low effort way of justifying anything.
> I'm good with it.
As is usually the case when the benefits are yours and the inconvenience (or more) is someone else's. Think just how many people are good with the downsides of having plentiful, cheap oil for example. Says nothing about the issue but speaks volumes about the person.
Too bad someone can't just use a Flipper Zero to turn off Starlink satellites if they're distracting [0].
Of course you are good with it, hopefully whatever you do with Internet everywhere you go is more important, and impactful than what radio astronomers could do without the radio pollution.
> Same as we were fine with every other thing that seemed like it was going to destroy the world.
We might be, or not. Anthropic bias: we can only observe the dice rolls that don't kill us.
For all we know, attitudes like yours are the solution to the Fermi paradox.
But this isn't about "will destroy us", this is about "is this interference even necessary?" and "do your personal benefits outweigh the harms to others?"
If I were in charge of the would I would say "let's put the telescopes in space" — but as I'm not, that's promising jam tomorrow to someone who wants food today.
I agree this should be fixed if it's possible. But if it meant 2x the price of the subscription, I'm pretty fine with them keeping it as it is. Global internet is just way too good for humanity to not do it.
And I'm saying this as someone who was seriously considering getting a Starlink connection (wired internet turned out to be good as well as cheap, but I was seriously considering Starlink).
> But if it meant 2x the price of the subscription, I'm pretty fine with them keeping it as it is.
If it was just about prices and nothing else, I'd be promoting the construction of an orbital ring launch system, which would inherently double as a global power grid and be a good place to mount PV.
Cheap space access (cheap enough to be used as a global 90-minute railway even if you have to go the long way around), cheap power supply (no clouds and less sun blocked by the air), cheap power transmission (because it's cross-subsidised with the other two).
> Global internet is just way too good for humanity to not do it.
So is "knowing where the asteroids are".
So we should just let a commercial entity piss away our (and our children's) ability to see the natural beauty of the universe then?
"You don't know what you've' got till it's gone, they paved paradise and put up a parking lot".
One can try to be a good neighbour and mindful of others sharing that space (in this case, radio frequencies coming from out of Earth), or one can be an asshole and say "no one owns this, I can do whatever I want".
> I think we’ll be fine. Same as we were fine with every other thing that seemed like it was going to destroy the world.
You can't know what will be missed, it's not about "will destroy the world", it's getting noisier, we will miss signals in those frequency ranges, and for what? So you and some others can travel around connecting to the Internet and posting on Hacker News? I don't think that improves our understanding of the cosmos, while the work of the people being impacted by the radio noise actually does improve our understanding of the fucking Universe.
I think it's quite clear what is more important for humanity... But assholes don't care about that, they launch some satellites to make some money, damned be others in their way.
The amount of people actually getting to access Wikipedia reliably for the first time because of Starlink is a tiny, tiny fraction of all users.
The pure hubris of not even communicating with the scientific community to tackle potential obstacles that could hinder their exploration is what's absolutely wrong, just a one-sided decision to fuck it up because they can.
> The stars ain't going to change. Maybe you'll miss a few supernovas. If I were a radio astronomer I'd actually be rejoicing now, because this gives me a legitimate need for the budget required to build my own Hubble-like telescope, far away from Starlink.
Oh, that's great, go tell that to the PhDs in radio astronomy right now that might be getting fucked in their observations while on a time crunch to get their doctorate because someone decided to turn on GHz radios in space that mess with their instruments developed through the research of thousands before them.
Also tell us the taxpayers that investment in our expensive radio astronomy equipment on Earth is getting less useful because one company decided they can fuck with the spectrum they've been developed to listen to, I'm sure that the observatories on this list [0] don't really care and now are tingling with joy because they can spend even more public money to build radio telescopes but in space™.
Have you ever tried to get grants to build instruments that cost 9 figures dollars, and a decade or more to be finished?
Or they have the same rules for like Tesla chargers where you can't ask for a fee.
Almost every campsite has dozens at this point
My sister uses it out in the bush, very expensive but works extremely well
Unless another government chooses to nationalise fibre installations on a permanent and on-going basis (outside metro areas) we’ll continue being scalped in perpetuity.
The private sector in Australia has repeatedly failed to deliver even somewhat competitive prices in a number of key sectors. With a population <10% that of the USA, we do not have enough people for the private sector to not end up in a monopoly or duopoly.
Markets work really well when they incentivise competition but Australia has unique geographical and demographic factors which do not facilitate that incentivisation to sustain itself.