Building An Internet Connection Through The Arctic | Hacker News Reader

Building An Internet Connection Through The Arctic

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24 pointsadamcarson6 comments

This is a ballsy venture. The northwest passage is notoriously unpredictable and Canada does not have the heavy ice breakers needed to rescue a cable-laying ship unfortunate enough to become ice-bound. If the worst happens, the operators will have to abandon ship and evacuate by air.

Still, their chances are a lot better than they would be if they tried to build cable across land in Canada at present. Environmentalists are so whipped up into a frenzy about pipelines that any kind of infrastructure project that crosses multiple provincial borders is doomed to languish in bureaucracy for decades. The rapid approval of this project truly is a sign of how hard-up Nunavut is for affordable bandwidth!

On a more humorous note, how hilarious would be it if HFT traders had to move to the artic to position themselves in between London and Toyko? Freeze suckers!

It is super cool that Nunuavut will end up with better internet access because of this.

Says Cunningham, “It is made possible by climate change.”

Would love for climate change deniers to attempt an alternative explanation. Gentlemen, start your contortions.

I believe in climate change because I trust the experts who have done analyses of global temperature (and to a lesser extent, climate models).

Individual events like this could be cherry picked, so I don't know if they are good evidence or not. If I wasn't convinced by the science I described above, I don't think I would be convinced by this, unless it was accompanied by a similarly rigorous statistical analysis.

Right, but certain individual events are signifiers for larger systemic changes. If one needs reliable summer access through the arctic for this to work, relying on a fluke isn't going to work.

The problem with climate change is that there is plenty of rigorous statistical analysis... and yet ppl deny the analyses, deny the evidence collection, deny that there is any evidence. I'd like to think this is a different game now that business are making decisions predicated on it.

I bet the Earth climate has been changing ever since the beginning of its existence.

Who thought it was a good idea to use dark blue as the colour for land in the map at the top of the article?

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