Hacker News Reader

Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

> Can you source a citation referring to people that had "no proper grounding in multi day off road adventuring"

Sure - West Australian newspaper pretty much any week of the year - tourists come from all over the globe to visit the vast untamed outback, rent a 4x4, head out, and get into life threatening (sometimes life ending) trouble despite having a phone connection via either mobile towers or starlink. You know, no charge, no backup, no paper maps, no experience, etc.

Whether you like it or not, ePiRBs being an easily accesible service has actually saved dozens of noobs and experienced personal from certain death by offering emergency service alerting - Fact! (and no internet required)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_position-indicating_...

View on HN

No, I don't like it. Because it relies on someone getting a specialized piece of hardware in advance of an emergency. That's a silly notion.

You could do that, or you could do the 21st century thing, and put up enough satellites to have emergency-grade LTE coverage across the entire country. Compatible with any smartphone.

> it relies on someone getting a specialized piece of hardware in advance of an emergency.

Like Starlink? Glad we agree.

> to have emergency-grade LTE coverage across the entire country.

Literally does not stop people dying and is not a substitute for knowing what you're doing in remote areas.

The claim was:

  For all its minuses the internet makes these long trips 10x easier.

which is false - at best it's a 5% improvement on what was required as prep for long remote trips before Starlink.

A big issue with yelling help! from a remote location rather than having the skill set to self rescue is that now third parties (rescuers) are putting themselves at risk and using their time and resources which may or may not be reimbursed.

There's LTE from space already btw in Australia. Will one day be a carrier requirement.

In a perfect world, everyone is perfectly knowledgeable and prepared for any eventuality and nothing bad and unexpected ever happens at all.

May I remind you what world are we living in?

Denying emergency comms to people who didn't buy specialized hardware because "they should have prepared better" sounds like social darwinism to me.

Especially in an age when everyone has in their pocket a smartphone that's crammed full of advanced RF tech. Starlink has Direct to Cell on new sats, iPhones can use GEO satcom - what's your excuse?

> what's your excuse?

I fetch idiots out of remote areas.

With or without Starlink, they're unprepared.

People that are prepared for remote areas have been getting by without it for millennia.

What's you're actual on the ground experience here?

So, you want to save people, but you also want people who were not "prepared for remote areas" to just die somewhere, out of contact and out of your sight, and you also want to bitch about how stupid and unprepared they were?

That sure is a funny way of doing things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com