Some scientific endeavors can be paused and maybe later relaunched, if funding has not dried up and temporarily-worthless machinery has not been left to rot.

But stuff like mitigating the constant threat of big enough objects showing up on a collision course with earth should not be paused until those eye-catchers fall out of the sky. If there is something coming at us that can wipe out more than the stock price of one particularly space-enthusiastic company, we should like to know within a time period appropriate for our current planetary defense capabilities. Which will surely improve, over time - so maybe we can pollute the sky, later.

China’s constellations are going to orbits that will take hundreds of years to return to earth and could make launching much harder if there is a collision. As far as I know only SpaceX has satellites in low orbits that frequently need propulsion to push back up, and fall back within 5 years.

A few years is a large knowledge gap if an asteroid is on its way to us.

Not to mention that’s not how it works. We regret burning so much fossil fuel but those who make huge profits from it prevent as much change as they can.

You can bet Amazon and SpaceX will do the same no matter how the rest of us regrets it

> that constellation is already up there and if its fine right now

A lot of astronomers disagree.

All satellites in LEO only show up at close to sunset (and sunrise): When they're away from the terminator, they're either on the sun-side, and hence you can't see them for all the blue sky around them, or the night-side, in which case you can't see them because they're not lit by the sun because the Earth is in the way.

I'm still checking the maths on how bright a million satellites in a terminator-following SSO would be. I'm getting very big numbers. But then, the (vague and aspirational) suggestions I'm seeing right now for SpaceX are in the 120 kW range, which is huge, and lining up a million of those is enough for a contiguous ring just under 10 meters wide (how much under is "just under" depends both on how efficient the PV is and how high in LEO you go).

Regardless of if they're all in one orbit or spread over in multiple orbits at different shells that are all terminator-following SSO, from the ground you're getting a train of things with somewhat higher brightness than the ISS, with a fairly small apparent separation that (I tentatively think) becomes less than your eyes can resolve at at least one point in the sky (if there's say 50 shells, where those 50 get close to crossing).

> 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

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

> I think we should wait to see how the first satellite data centre works out. It seems fairly unlikely that it could be practical. It seems kind of nuts...

I strongly suspect that what'll happen is SpaceX does launch satellites with onboard GPUs, so the SpaceX hypemen can go "the skeptics said it couldn't be done!" and take off before the actual, more crucial question of "does it make _financial_ sense?" is answered in the extreme negative

There are many feasibility and safety issues associated with the Reflect Orbital plan. It doesn’t make as much sense as you might think. For instance, the satellites can only illuminate areas a relatively short time after local sunset. The Sun reflection could potentially damage an amateur astronomer’s eye if one of the satellites crosses their telescope’s field of view: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/true-cost-solar-powe...

I can think of several practical uses. It would be very useful immediately after a disaster. Lighting up the night would make search & rescue much more effective. It would also allow for more solar power generation in an area, reducing pollution. Extra light at high latitudes in the winter would reduce seasonal depression.

Are they worth the cost/tradeoffs? I don’t know. But there is practical value to lighting up the night.

Interesting that your list omits China considering they have firm plans to launch ~41k satellites for government/commercial constellations plus ITU filings for >200k proposed satellites.

They're already itching to throw space-lasers into orbit. [0]

I wish I was joking.

[0] https://www.jpost.com/defense-and-tech/article-900854

Or defense.

I think that "Africans should not have access to high-speed satellite Internet" is something you've just made up; the article you link talks about African people turning to Starlink because of local infrastructure issues, and the original article notes that the current satellite count is currently around 14k satellites. 100k is more than enough satellites to provide high-speed satellite internet globally.

The article makes mention of specific endeavours, like the night-time mirror satellites, which are particularly disruptive to astronomy, and the general risks of high numbers of satellites.

The ability to do Earth based astronomy is something that is of value to all the peoples of Earth, and is mainly funded by the western nations because of their current position as the people with more money.

> These kinds of caps have for years been a dampener on human flourishing.

I don't think blocking the view of the night sky is necessary for "human flourishing", actually. Your attitude reminds me of the Victorians, who saw their coal-smoke filled skies as a sign of virtuous progress.

More reasonable minds prevailed, in the end, and now most people have a more balanced view - with the understanding that progress and industry must be balanced with the ecosystem we live in and depend upon for life.

As a literal leftist by any reasonable metric, the recent trend towards “I wish it was 1995” and “AI is the worst” and “tech sucks now” from people I agree with on many other points frustrates me to no end.

“You guys know we could basically live in a Star Trek style utopia if we get this right, right?”

“The DATA cenTERS are STEALING the water and breaking Taleckshual ProPerty LERRS!”

Like, I thought we were for piracy, and against capital colonizing the space of creative ideas? But I guess what a lot of people were fond of was feeling important.

I didn't understand what these satellites were really like until I visited Zion National Park two weeks ago. Zion is an International Dark Sky park, and so I was really looking forward to seeing the stars. Instead we sat outside and watched dozens and dozens of fast-moving stars zip around on all sorts of trajectories. I'm not saying it ruined the experience (I'm not an astronomer, and it was kind of fun.) But it really brought home how fundamentally we've changed the sky. I also hope we're able to lay enough fiber in developing countries that this many satellites don't need to stay up there forever.

Rubbish. Its 99% of the time people trying to make money and that's it.

As though Africans aren't interested in the stars, or climate change, or that they can't figure out fibre optics is borderline racist.

Europe - and soon the rest of us - are facing massive heat waves that are likely driven by climate change, it's a real problem.

That's 'actual science'.

By all means, build what you like, but you don't get to dump your externalizations on everyone else. There is no 'We' in your projects, you don't speak for us.

In related news, earlier this year Chile cancelled plans for a gigawatt-scale solar/wind powered hydrogen production plant nearby the ESO facility in the Atacama desert after light pollution complaints from European scientists.

Well, if you build too many satellites in the swarms, at some point you will lose the ability to see or go to the stars.

This is a good point.

A similar thread that links your examples together is how we all want to be the last person up the ladder. The last person to move into some neighborhood or into the last apartment complex. Or into a country. The last person to have internet access. Now we want to freeze how it is. Everyone after us threatens our experience.

An American with access to good internet for decades is annoyed that their stargazing session isn't what it used to be now that the city is growing and creating more light or that other people are getting to tech up.

> we will build Sun orbital structures and swarms,

Another episode of arrogant fantasy in the ponyworld.

Can you expand more on your plans to give Africans more access to high speed internet?

Moving all of astronomy to space based observations is entirely incompatible with the way that instruments are funded, built, and deployed. It is only valid for a set of highly specific and well funded observatories that take decades to get off the ground and can never be updated, improved, or modified to search new scientific directions.

Why don’t “we” just build more cell towers?

Maybe a fair allocation of sattelites would be proportional to the number of citizens with voting rights in the country. Maybe with some modifier about how impactful that voting can actually be (eg. citizen initiatives vs. just electing representatives from a preselected pool).

These kinds of caps have for years been a dampener on human flourishing.

I am a human being. I flourish when I can see the planets and stars.

The utopia you describe sounds more like technological fetishism that benefits a select few, not the entirety of humanity.

This is unrealistic, uncharitable, and tribalistic.

The "let builders and capitalists do anything because the future will be better for it" isn't a technically considered position. It's a tautology.

> These kinds of caps have for years been a dampener on human flourishing. My observation has been that those in stagnation or decline tend to attach themselves to these desires to hold the status quo. Anti-energy, anti-housing, anti-industry and so on because they've reached a local maxima in their ability to live and have chosen to spend their life in leisure.

This kind of attitude has for millenia been a dampener on human flourishing. My observation has been that those without empathy or foresight tend to attach themselves to these initiatives to obliterate our shared human heritage to satisfy their own ridiculous misconception of progress. Anti-intellectual, anti-curious, anti-social and so on because they've reached a local maxima in their ability to give a damn about what it means to live a good life and have chosen to spend their life in self-satisfied ignorance.

“Anti” is a kind of super-meme that took over discourse in a lot of spheres, especially anywhere near academia, starting in the 1970s.

If I had to trace it to one source it would probably be the Club of Rome and Limits to Growth. Paul Erlich would be a close second with The Population Bomb.

Here’s a great podcast on the latter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn1gieFMuWI

This stuff sounds right because obviously you can’t have infinite growth in population or resource use on a finite planet. That means it won’t happen. The question is “how will it not happen?” The answer right now looks like “as people get wealthier they have fewer kids.” There are other possible answers like dematerialization of the economy which is also a thing.

Before the 70s this stuff would have been called far right and identified with ideologies like authoritarian eugenics and fascism. The 70s is when a lot of “volkisch” proto-fascist and crypto-fascist ideas got a lefty hippie makeover. The other big one is the idea that “natural” is inherently good.

I finally see this stuff getting some challenge from all across the political spectrum, even from the left. In previous decades you only ever saw it get challenged from the right or from what were once called libertarians.

And swarms

> But there is the rest of the world, and if I'm told that the Africans

When the average African live like the average American we'll be truly fucked, probably even before that. We should raise the bottom for sure but we definitely need to cure the degeneracy of the top too

Technosolutionism is a cult. We either put the caps on ourself or nature will hard cap us anyways, in a much harsher way.

Agreed, I think the entire issue can be resolved with more telescopes in orbit.

I can understand European Southern Observatory (ESO) being concerned about becoming obsolete, but is the astronomy community as a whole concerned about the issue?

I understand there's currently around 722 observatories (some defunct, some are in orbit) based on this source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronomical_observato...

But perhaps there are others I am unaware of.

Quoted: Hainaut explains that "satellites, illuminated by the Sun, are much brighter than distant galaxies. When a satellite crosses what we observe, it makes a bright streak on our image, zapping whatever is behind it."

It sounds like this only affects visible light telescopes.

Who is we? Certainly not amateur astronomers who made important discoveries with their telescopes

It’s not just about where the observatories are. It’s where they want to point to. Good luck figuring out which part of the night sky isn’t important for astronomy.

Europe has given up on advancing anything and their only solutions to problems is regulations.

I really wanted to downvote this because I hate the constant EU bashing, but I just have to agree.

So we can’t see the stars from Munich anymore? Yes, that’s depressing, but we’re not trying to reduce light smog in Munich right now, are we? Because all the buildings that have been build, all the streets and trains, also make it hard to see the stars.

More light is one of the things progress has always brought, and eventually we will just have to accept that we started building in the sky, too.

We should introduce a global agreement that commercial satellites must fall out of the sky within a few years to reduce debris. It should be an agreeable term since the debris hinders everyone doing business up there. Every nation is going to partially ignore it anyway, for military purposes for example. But that’s a different demand than a cap on the total number of satellites.

you can still go outside at night and look up. get a grip.

Should so many large institutions taking it seriously not give you pause? Cause you to consider that perhaps they're economically viable for a reason you're unaware of? Or even that you could have a misunderstanding about the physics?

Compare it to air planes, which are already at a much more significant scale. Accounting for fuel type and combustion efficiency seems relevant.

I recall around SpaceX 100th landing, that a day of just transatlantic flights was more than everything SpaceX had done to that point

Likely because, in space, reflective items don't heat up as much from sunlight as would a dark, energy absorbing, material. Shedding heat in space is a difficult enough endeavor already without also painting your satellite black so it reflects less light (and thereby absorbs more heat).

And what are they reflecting when they are in Earth's shadow?

maybe for example because thanks to them we have satellites in the first place?

I agree with this and I'm not an astronomer btw.

No, only 3.7%

For people that like to go outside on the other hand, its a real issue