I have not heard a car for a few hours. Not even the rumble of traffic in the distance and I can see the night sky without light pollution. It is a very privileged experience in some ways and while it has its advantages we are measurably disadvantaged in most human development metrics: health, education, income etc compared to people living in urban areas of our own country. The disadvantage is real and pops up everywhere from cancer survivability to suicide rates. Equitable internet access is more important than many people appreciate. If we can improve services to everyone AND protect radio astronomy that is a worthy goal.
How does fiber being cheap help them if no ISP is willing to dig miles and miles of trenches to lay it and connect to their home? I live in the middle of suburbia and don’t have access to fiber.
Your comment about subsidizing their lifestyle doesn’t really make sense. What are you subsidizing exactly? This tech is also useful in poorer countries that don’t have the infrastructure at all.
The number of satellites in orbit around Earth is rapidly increasing, with some 100,000 expected to be in place by 2030. And as their numbers grow, so does the difficulty of observing the universe from Earth.
Starlink’s satellites are bright enough that astronomers have decried them as an existential threat for as long as SpaceX has been launching them into orbit. While the company has taken some measures to mitigate how shiny they appear from Earth, their increased number and the many other satellites being launched means that their light pollution is “threatening the entirety of ground-based astronomy in every wavelength and in different ways,” astronomers told the BBC. There is a fear that soon, space observation might begin to look like a “windshield of bugs,” and become unfeasible, a researcher at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile told The New York Times.
So basically, at least during the rest of this decade, our billion dollar telescopes, radio and optical, are blind on different frequencies or are only able to obtain diffuse resolution.
As technology advances, our ability to observe the universe from space far surpasses ground-based telescopes. While I appreciate amateur astronomy, let’s acknowledge that satellites like those in low Earth orbit can occasionally interfere with surface observations. Instead of criticizing their presence, perhaps we could focus on working together to minimize disruptions and support continued space exploration – after all, observatories like JWST are pushing the boundaries of our understanding.
This is an insane take. “While I appreciate amateur astronomy” - my dude, it’s not amateurs being affected here. You want to let a small number of tools become the only way humanity has to make these kinds of observations? You think the tools up there can somehow be made to equal the capacity and accommodate the man hours required to do the science we do?
Don’t forget important discoveries are also made by or with the help of amateurs, who permanently observe the night sky and measure the coordinates, i.e. the relative positions, of luminating objects. This allows others, mostly professionals, to calculate their motions and obtain information about the (hidden) masses, i.e. luminating and non luminating objects, inducing and influencing them. By this means, black holes, ‘dark’ masses, or asteroids, ‘fast’ moving illuminated objects, have been and are beeing discovered.
Discoveries about and observations of comets, supernovae, even exoplanet transits are regularly being enriched or even driven in some cases by “amateur” astronomers.
This guy’s legit out of his mind or he’s been huffing Elon’s musk.
Considering their instance, I’d assume they’re more out of their mind than huffing Elmo.
Another important part in this argumentation is that each type of telescope has its use case:
Extraterrestrial telescopes, as they are not objected by atmospheric blur can obtain much better ‘images’ from the cosmos even of weak, low brightness signals, which makes them best for observing the ‘far’ cosmos until the boundaries of recognition.
Yet, they are and always will be much more expensive and more difficult to maintain than terrestrial telescopes. Thus, using them for observing our cosmic front yard, the milky way, is like shooting with canons at sparrows.
Due to their cost, extraterrestrial telescopes also will always be ‘few’, too few to effectively keep track of the objects around us. Thus, ‘cheap’ terrestrial telescopes, large professional ones and small ones run by amateurs, will always be needed to observe the objects ‘closely’ around us, i.e. in our galaxis.
Suggesting that we move towards space-based astronomy doesn’t mean he’s out of his mind. He might not be a professional astronomer or astrophysicist, but that hardly indicates insanity.
They had an opinion and expressed it. You can then reply and explain why you disagree. No need to call them insane for expressing their thoughts.
The tools “up there” could be made to rival the capacity and accommodate the man hours required to more science than we do now. The problem is it’s hard and expensive and nobody wants to try because of that fact. It’s becoming easier with cheaper launch vehicles and better communications infrastructure. Now we need folks to start identifying the best locations to send new observation satellites and then start building and launching them.
Your take is very conservative and counter to technological progress and I don’t appreciate the personal attack. We can have a meaningful conversation without that crap.
I can imagine it but it certainly won’t be practical to implement in our lifetimes. There are certainly some observatories that benefit from being based in space (optical and infrared) and even gravitational detectors such as laser interferometers. However aside from the wide capture area radio telescopes need large amounts of compute to separate the signal from the noise. The amount of data that needs to be processed makes space based radio observatories very hard to implement.
Maybe the dark side of the moon will make a decent observatory one day but we haven’t set foot on the place for decades, let alone built anything so complex.
Radiation associated with Starlink satellites was detected at observing frequencies between 110 and 188 MHz, which is well below the 10.7- 12.7 GHz radio frequencies used for the downlink communication signals.
(The original article said 5M radiation, which should be around 60MHz.)
So Starlink is emitting RF in spectrum where they shouldn’t, which is avoidable, but takes effort.
My guess, and I could be wrong, is that this could be related to something other than the radio(s), such as switching power supplies finding opportunistic structures from which to radiate.
Starlink seems like a genuinely interesting and useful technology, in some ways.
But it also seems like it might not be worth having.
I’m thinking they might need to be deorbited, but I’m not confident in that yet. It sounds like it might be fixable in a new generation of Internet constellation satellites.
Idk how long the issue should be tolerated to wait for that, though. And while Starlink has a good amount of customers this kind of Internet is genuinely useful for, it’s still not a lot compared to all the other internet services.
Maybe Starlink deorbiting should come along with an expansion of the traditional communications network. But maybe it would be extremely expensive to reach Starlink’s customers with towers or cables.
Obviously this is a problem for radio astronomers. I keep hoping we’ll build the proposed Lunar Crater Telescope so we can have a truly silent view of the universe.
For multi-mode (full duplex) you would still need a power amp repeater every 500 meters, which requires a lot of power and create noise. You can’t be quiet with noise.
Yes, because there’s no way to transmit power or data anywhere without being loud af in any signal spectrum. It’s physically impossible.
Even with fiber, you need a laser to beam the signal, and a powerful amp on the moon to recieve the signal and boost it with fuck ton of high power repeaters to the other side of the moon which is also loud af
Be that as it may, it’d be minimal compared to the interference that terrestrial radio observatories have to deal with.
I guess I’m just saying that I don’t understand why you’re being so negative about the concept when it’s clearly going to be orders of magnitude better than existing antennae.
Some of Musk’s bootlickers have said to me, offline in person, that the le epic Starlink debris in space fucking with astronomy (as it has for a while now) “will only encourage the exodus off planet” followed by the PR spiel about “humans must become interplanetary species.”
May as well say that the cradle must be burned with the baby in it so the baby is encouraged to compete in Olympic track and field.
All those sci-fi movies about human beings acting as an interplanetary infection only to find retribution at the hands (paws? Claws? Appendages) of an eldritch creature taught us nothing 😔
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