To quote the movie The Graduate, Plastics! We know it’s bad, we know it is a problem, we know there are huge plastic gyres in the ocean and yet we still continue to use it in everything. Why does everything have to be packaged in clear plastic clamshells, how many Alf keychains do we need, how much plastic do we need in the food chain of the planet, or in our own bodies?
I am absolutely confident that space exploration etc. is not a solution to anything, now or in the future. It’s a sport, nothing more. An enormously wasteful sport.
When your right-now problems are the degradation of the planet’s climate, water, soil, air, and the building disasters which will not just affect all the billions of human beings but all living things, fucking around dreaming about space is beyond irrational.
In 25 years, the whole planet will be direly changed. Mass extinctions of animals and plants, desertification on a boggling scale, death of ocean ecosystems – all these things are happening RIGHT NOW. People can’t grasp how imminent climate collapse is, and what it will be like for us. Many cities will have to be abandoned by then. Wars over resources that are far more basic that fossil fuel will become chronic. Things like food and water. The history of human beings so far shows that people become more and more violent the more threatened their survival seems to them. That will increase exponentially.
Many people, the smarter ones, are not ‘choosing to ignore’ but rather, are seeing clearly and despairing. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard, among my own age cohort, “I’m glad I’ll be dead before the worst happens”.
I’d say a coming trend is going to be the cultural acceptance of suicide as a rational act.
Then you haven’t been paying attention. SpaceX started as a means to create a Mars colony. I would agree that that is stupid. But in the process, they have dropped the cost of space launch by more than an order of magnitude.
This enabled the building of Low Earth Orbit internet satellite constellations. This is the biggest boon to the third world they have ever had. In one product, Starlink will have done more for the remote poor of the world than any other foreign aid. It will bring commerce and education to remote villages. It will enable people to move to rural areas and still remain connected for working at home. This will also allow people to work without having to live in places where real estate prices are crazy. It will lower the cost and improve the speed of satellite service on planes and ships. It’s all solar powered, so it reduces the energy footprint of being an ISP. It also brings ISP competition to places that were locked into one provider, solving the ‘net neutrality’ problem.
Oh, and it’s helping to win the war in Ukraine. Big time. Ukrainians have high speed, un-jammable and secure communications across the battlefield due to Starlink. Russia does not. This makes a huge difference. If you support Ukraine, you should be very happy that SpaceX ‘wasted’ money on space exploration.
Why does space only get this treatment? Why don’t you complain about the cost of Disneyworld? Or the energy expense of the fashion industry? Or cruise ships? How about the billions we spend each year on pet care? Do athletes need billion dollar contracts? Do you know how much energy and money a big budget Hollywood film consumes? Is it stupid or irrational to enjoy that? Computer gaming rigs can consume a kilowatt, and the industry spends billions and billions making games. Should we be doing that while the planet needs fixing?
Whenever someone supports space exploration, another person always pops up to say we should stop until we’ve solved all problems of Earth. But they don’t apply the same reasoning to a host of other things we spend more money on with far less secondary benefit, or no benefit at all.
At least space exploration gives us a hope for a future where heavy manufacturing is moved off the olanet, and mining of asteroids may one day replace dirty mining on Earth. If we lower space launch costs further, solar power satellites may become feasible, solving our energy problems and greening the Earth. We are in very early days. In the meantime, Starlink will be a boon to many millions of people - the people who need help the most, the poor in countries without infrastructure.
In 25 years?? This is pure alarmism. There is no scientific evidence that anything will be this dire in 25 years. In that short a timespan, the ‘signal’ of global warming is hard to even spot. The Earth could even be cooler in 25 years, while still warming up over a longer time frame.
The Earth is currently warming at a rate of about .32 degrees F per decade. In 25 years, the Earth may be .7 degrees warmer. Or maybe slightly warmer or cooler because of variance. In any event, if you were transported 25 years into the future you’d find that the Earth has changed about as much as it has changed since 2000. Back then we had plenty of predictions that by now island nations would be vanishing under the water, Britain would never have snow again, etc. None of that happened. The Earth is slightly warmer. There has been no net warming for 8 years, due to climate variability. The coral reefs are recovering. The dire predictions for 2025 all failed.
The number of people here who think global warming is a major existential threat is surprising. The science has never suggested that. Read the the IPCC reports. Global warming is a problem, and it will cost us a fair bit to mitigate its effects and/or slow it down. It may cause some migration of people in the worst areas over the decades, and change the mix of plant and animal life somewhat over a very long period of time. It may affect global GDP by a few percent. But it isn’t going to destroy the world or wreck the ecosystem.
A bigger risk is that if enough people believe the hysteria, we will go to extreme lengths to stop it and do more damage to the world than the warming we are trying to stop.
Hmmm could when to is pretty dang fast.
That’s all you got? A nitpick about tense? The fact is, Starlink is already being used in the third world, so it IS helping.
As it expands to more countries, it COULD be a huge boon to them.
Happy now?
All of these imagined exaggerated benefits of Starlink are a pipe dream at best. It’s not magic and Starlink isn’t a charity.
Not even R-rated:
“My God, what’s Bond doing?”
“I think he’s attempting re-entry, sir!”
I never said it was magic, and no one said it was a charity. And the ‘pipe dream’ is already available in 32 countries. You didn’t bother reading the links, did you?
I’ve read the hype, yes. The pipe dream is all the things you say it’s going to magically improve.
What a strange ‘pipe dream’ when it’s already improving them.
I disagree it’s already improved anything beyond giving some people internet access.
That is a tangible improvement.
What I don’t quite understand is where Starlink fits: surely we already had the know-how to make this happen? It fits with the “private enterprise will save us where government won’t!” narrative, but I’m not so sure it fits the “space exploration is a positive good” narrative.
The latter looks more like “war is good—look at all the wartime inventions that improved civilian life!” I’d challenge that and say that the same scientists with the same support would have come up with the same solutions without the background of war (or space); it’s just that we refuse to support such research without the backdrop of conflict.
Nope. Debt erasure would be the biggest gift. Hell, Gate’s mosquito nets are a bigger boon.
On what devices, with what electricity? Yeah, so much for “one product”
This is a Developed World aspiration. Not what the Global South needs.
What does this have to do with the “Third World”[sic]?
And where are the remote poor in the Global South getting $600 initially and $100/month?
A village in Nigeria can put up solar panels to power Starlink, and share the connection. A school can buy one Starlink terminal and share it with all children. This is being done right now.
Because only space was mentioned. I would be more than overjoyed if one day everyone woke up and decided to put the billions wasted on mindless entertainments into fixing the planet. We could go back to being entertained by traveling theatre troupes, reading aloud, and group singing in the public square. People could travel at a human or animal pace, or travel by sailboat. All this would be absolutely great in my book.
As for the ‘hysteria’ over climate change, I guess you aren’t a biologist.
The obvious answer to me is the population crash we’re going to see worldwide. Many parts of the world will be losing a major portion of their labor force over the next 25 years.
I live in the US. I have no options for internet connectivity except satellite. Certainly nothing terrestrial. There are a lot of us in this situation.
Geosynchronous satellites work, but the ping is really too slow for working from home. Starlink fixed that.
Yeah, the space junk may become a problem, but I and many others that can now work from home are keeping our cars off the road. We are getting more done, not less. Certain cretins will of course put in a 4 hour day. But they do that anyway. I worked 12 hours yesterday, I’ll work about 6 today.
As Sam said, a remote village can set up something. Sure, not everyone is going to have a laptop, or even a light bulb. But people will have at least some information about the world.
I’m not as optimistic as Hans Rosling. The standard of living in developing countries is usually higher than Westerners think. This is why life expectancy has risen worldwide so quickly in recent decades. The vast majority of people have light, electricity and television. The majority of children are immunized, something like 90% worldwide even accounting for dissenters.
I am ambivalent about Musk. If you do not think the Internet essential these days, try going without it for a month and you will see it is essential. Many forms and documents are essentially digital only in most Western countries. So there is an enormous potential boon for Starlink to provide rural and remote communities with service. There is a latency problem in South Africa.
Forty countries sounds like an impressive number but much depends on what they are. Certainly the Internet can provide a lot of information but it remains to be seen how widely this is used and what it costs after government subsidies. Since the referenced articles refer largely to future projects and plans I look forward to seeing these advances used with beneficence. We are not there yet, and Ukraine seems to complicate things.
“To be piloted” “Will be running”. Are you posting from the future?
And I shouldn’t look at this gift horse’s mouth, but … why do you have to post cites that make my argument for me?
In response to lawmakers’ concerns over its affordability, Ingabire pointed out that, overall, based on its huge capacity and high speed, entities that need a lot of internet are the ones targeted by Starlink internet pilots.
You may think 48 000 Rwandan francs is pocket change, but it’s 20% of the average rural income. And that leaves aside the question of what devices are connected to this bandwidth, and their power. And not even touching the fact that Rwanda is not your typical Global South country, economically.
Mr. Bhargava acknowledged that most rural households will not be able to afford such high costs
If you think the poorest rural Indian schools can afford $100 a month, you don’t know what real rural poverty is like. If they had $100/month to spend, they might spend it first on a roof, or a working toilet, or desks, or one cooked meal a day. Or teachers. What’s the use of “cheap” internet, without the devices to connect to it or the power to run those devices? Or the calories to stave the gnawing hunger to allow you to focus on learning. Or hygiene facilities so girls can also go to school.
And that’s also leaving aside India’s overall a middle economy country.
Starlink is just another example of rich White technocrats improving the Global South by … selling things to them. Call me when they give it away for free, until then it’s about as useful as the One Laptop Per Child program - nice idea, didn’t actually do a lot of good.
Airplanes are interesting toys, but of no military value.
–Ferdinand Foch
And you’re just the one who decides what the fix is, or knows the one who does.