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Comment by prescriptivist | Hacker News Reader

I spent last weekend under some of the darkest sky you'll find in the eastern US. Miles from cell service. I had a starlink portable with me and it was nice to get some service and stay in touch, but to watch the sky is to see satellites everywhere.

I've spent a dozen or so weeklong stretches in the last few years completely off grid, only connection being bringing up the inReach once a day. At this point I actually get anxiety at the end of such a trip, knowing that I'm going to be wading through a morass of notifications and slack/email/texts. Doing a once or twice a day sync via starlink didn't really bother me so much when I'm out in the backcountry this last trip.

I'd love to be rid of all of it, but that's not how the world works today.

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> I'd love to be rid of all of it, but that's not how the world works today.

Why do we think the human made world is out of our control? Learned helplessness? We could stop this. We do not need Satrlink.

Starlink will fail. And this will be more likely the more satellites they put up[1][2]. Or the more wars we get in. It will not be hard to cause a major destruction of all Starlink satellites [3].

[1] https://outerspaceinstitute.ca/crashclock/ [2] https://spectrum.ieee.org/kessler-syndrome-crash-clock [3] https://gizmodo.com/russia-is-developing-orbiting-clouds-of-...

If you wish to stop it, then stop it.

I can’t stop. We can stop it.

Your comment was interesting.

i just read somewhere about spacex slowly destroying our dark night skies due to their satellite constellations. Thoughts?

Starlink satellites are intentionally designed to be very dark, but they become more visible when the sun is about to come up or if there are super bright light sources on the ground nearby to reflect off of them.

Thats a nice intent i guess but doesn’t seem to work well in practice

If there are super bright light sources on the ground nearby that are bright enough to produce a visible reflection off a satellite, you are about to be dead.

Yeah, I meant to point out there that there is a tension between the technology that I don't mind, but the infrastructure for it that I do mind. I don't really know what the answer is. I do know that we're probably not going to put this toothpaste back in the tube.

It’s just that, while so much of the sky is static, it’s impossible to gaze at without your attention being grabbed by the moving flick of light, it takes active effort to ignore it. So it’s a totally different experience stargazing now vs 20 years ago.

I love being off-grid with just my slow inReach Mini 1. I can communicate in case of an emergency, but otherwise it's a great forcing function to not be hyper connected. I worry if I brought the portable Starlink with I'd connect much more than necessary.

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