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Comment by Legend2440 | Hacker News Reader

This is a tradeoff we have to make with infrastructure and development in general. How do you balance human needs with pristine nature?

Do we put up long-distance power lines and wind farms even though they ruin the views? Do you tear down a forest to put up farmlands and suburbs? Do you build a dam to provide water for irrigation, even though it kills the fish and floods a valley?

Satellites are actually easier than most of those tradeoffs, because nothing lives in space and there's no nature to destroy. It only affects us.

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> How do you balance human needs with pristine nature?

How about we set a limit on how many satellites? That’s exactly how to balance

And who decides which satellites are approved? Is there a quota per country? Per capita? If a country declines to participate, do we count their satellites?

Centralized control from a benevolent dictator sounds great as a first approximation but rarely survives diving into the details.

Who sets it, then? The people that can make money out of the satellites or use their services or the people that want clean skies?

And how do you enforce it? It's not like you can just go up there an repo the satellites.

Setting a limit on a number of satellites seems rather arbitrary and not very effective to actually achieve a specific result.

I would argue that setting a limit is the enforcement mechanism, not the balancing mechanism.

A scientific justification is the balancing mechanism that produces the number which is then enforced.

Let’s set a limit on the number of houses that can be built while we’re at it.

That's like saying "how about we set a limit on horses in 1899 to limit horse shit on streets".

Answer was: automobile.

A limit that India and China are totally going to ignore?

They won't ignore it if Americans and Europeans agree to contribute their fair share to the well-being of all the people and stop hoarding all the world's wealth to themselves. A situation where the minimum wage in some regions of the US is over $15, while in parts of India have the median wage is less than 50 cents, is an unjust absurdity.

India having a wage of 50 cent is somehow America's fault? They failed to develop their infrastructure, and as a result their economy. That's their fault, nobody else's.

Look, I'm not suggesting we do anything bad to Americans and Europeans. Just let them pay their fair share to those they've driven into poverty.

Or do you enjoy the suffering of billions of people working for less than 50 cents? Americans and Europeans only need to share with them what is let say above $5, and then we can get almost $2 for EVERY worker on Earth.

It is necessary to at least slightly limit one’s greed and show compassion to other people who are in an extremely vulnerable position.

If only there was some way that countries could make international agreements on things...

They hinder the view on asteroids coming our way.

The purpose of most of these satellites is internet access where we already have less limited possibilities with less maintenance costs like constant replacement

No they don't. It's more of an issue for long-exposure galaxies and nebula.

And asteroids are an extremely rare threat in the first place. It's literally a once-in-a-million-years kind of event.

Dinosaur killers? Yes.

City killers? That size hits more often

> Asteroids with a diameter more than 30–50 metres (100–150ft) are large enough to make it through our atmosphere intact, however, and the chance of this happening is estimated to be around once in every 100 years.

> The damage from an impact of this size would be wide-ranging, and could wipe out an entire city if they were to impact a heavily populated area.

https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/chances-ast...

We lack the technology to detect this size of asteroid with enough time to do anything about it.

Luckily, the majority of the earth's surface is unpopulated. Most of these rocks hit the ocean or Siberia and cause few or no casualties. The odds of it hitting a major city are quite low.

That’s why luck is a big factor and amateur astronomers are a great help in spotting them by chance

What exactly do you propose to do with a 50m chondite coming our way?

We have agencies to handle that but they need to know it’s coming.

We have? I would like a short list of those. Last one I knew was X-COM from 1994 and that was fiction.

That "if it hits a populated area" reduces the probability by a factor 100 (because about 1% of the world's surface is urbanized [1]).

So the actual frequency of "city wiped" is more like once every 10000 years. Completely negligible compared to other city-wiping events (earthquakes or floods for example).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_land_use_for_food_...

But it’s an additional risk.

The more risks the more likely one of them will hit you.

> They hinder the view on asteroids coming our way

Source?

> These proposals, combined with others considered in the study, would dramatically brighten the night sky, hindering humankind’s ability to observe faint cosmic targets, including far-away galaxies, some Earth-like planets around other stars, and even asteroids potentially dangerous to Earth.

The article

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