Astronomers seek global ban on space advertising | Hacker News Reader

Astronomers seek global ban on space advertising

spacenews.com

52 pointsbelter22 comments

There should be a high sales tax on all advertising. It's the perfect thing to tax:

- Luxury product companies advertise the most (utilities rarely do). The tax will decrease consumption of the most economically "unnecessary"

- Advertisers charge more money to show ads to rich people than on poor people - even a flat % tax will naturally impact the rich more than the poort

- Prices are set by auction at the maximum of the advertisers willingness to pay - this means tax revenue will hit the supplier of ads not the buyer

- Tax on ads is fundamentally a tax on consumption not income

- It's a zero sum positional product - ads make use of finite physical space/attention. This is close to a negative externality that people cannot contract away (eg i cannot contract the billboard company to not show me ads for $5/mo). On the web, this could technically be done, but the marginal value is so low and the number of billboard providers so high that transaction costs prevent it from happening

I am actually willing to have space ads if there were a super high tax on it. Imagine to show a message to all of humanity for a week, you must first pay $100B of taxes to all of humanity. That might be worth it.

I've been surprised there's less discussion of advertising taxes than much more complicated things like land value taxes, even though advertising/marketing is 1/5th of GDP in developed markets.

See https://adtax.paulromer.net/

The first few paragraphs of this article suggest the structure is not "here's a well-reasoned economic argument for why ad taxes are utile", but "I hate Google and similar companies, so we should screw them over with punitive targeted taxes".

Paul Romer has received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. While that's just an appeal to authority, it still has more substance than dismissing a long post without even having read the majority of it. I encourage you to read the whole thing before concluding that there is no well-reasoned economic argument in this text.

This reminds me of a passage about the brutal Cola Wars from Rob Grant and Doug Naylor's "Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers"…

For anyone living on Earth the result would be mindfizzlingly spectacular. One hundred and twenty-eight stars would appear to go supernova simultaneously, burning with such ferocity they would be visible even in daylight.

And the hundred and twenty-eight supernovae would spell out a message.

And this would be the message:

‘COKE ADDS LIFE!’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buy_Jupiter

Maybe widespread campaigns boycotting for a certain amount of time companies that do that kind of advertising would end this madness.

You could shoot a rocket filled with some sort of paint/stain directly at the moon. If you made a large enough splatter it would be visible from everyone on earth and get folks mad/go viral.

This sounds like a question for Munroe’s What If. My completely uninformed guess is that it would take many rockets to make a sufficiently-large splash.

I agree. The surface of the moon is 4E7KM^2. Assuming you paint only one side it's slightly bigger than the surface of Russia.

It's silly to paint near the border of the visible side because the surface is almost tangent to the line of sight. It's better to paint the central part and keep the border white. (It's also better if you want contrast with the background or your logo has a withe circle around it.)

Anyway, painting only the central half of the visible surface, it's 1E7Km^2 that's slightly larger than the surface of Canada=China=USA.

You would not need to paint the entire visible surface, you could settle for filling in a crater like Tycho (which is smaller than the state of Delaware). That would still get folks super mad!

Only a "global" ban? They really need a better term for prohibiting things in space.

"Universal"

Space advertising is coming whether we like it or not, but we can protect astronomy without fighting progress. What if ad satellite operators shared their real-time telemetry and optical characteristics through an open API? Our image processing software could automatically remove these artifacts from observations, similar to how we already handle other known light sources.

Radio astronomy solved similar challenges through coordination rather than conflict. By streaming position and reflection data, operators can build goodwill while astronomers keep their clear skies. The tech for this exists today - we just need to establish good industry practices early.

>Space advertising is coming whether we like it or not, but we can protect astronomy without fighting progress.

I'm sorry but you're calling space ads "progress" or I'm just missing the sarcasm here

Imagine going out camping in the woods with your kids too show them the outdoors and escape it all and only to look up and see an advert for Facebook. :(

Sometimes when I go camping, outside the glow of the city, I see the bright dots of the "Starlink satellite train"—that arc of newly launched satellites on their way into orbit. Even knowing what they are, and that they're temporary, just seeing them up in the sky is obscene. There should be places you can go where humans can't ruin the view.

Devil's advocate/ hot take: this is peak NIMBY, screwing over rural people half a world away because you don't want to see a few extra stars in the night sky when camping.

To be clear, Starlink isn't really the problem, because the satellite train is ephemeral. My point was just that seeing it gives me an idea of how obscene an actual space advertisement would be. Space isn't in my backyard, it's literally something everyone in the world can see—and I'm not saying it's okay for there to be space advertisements in someone else's backyard either. It's bad for everybody.

I think at that point we can officially start saying we live in a dystopia

Given how much it costs to launch anything into space, and especially something big enough to be visible from earth, and the amount of sales gained vs. the massive expense, I don't think it even needs to be banned; the companies with enough budget to do it are already big enough to be known by almost everyone, and the small ones who would benefit the most from the reach can't afford it.

If that happens, let there be riots of unthinkable sizes.

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