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Comment by uncoder0 | Hacker News Reader

I am betting that Starlink will have an impact on where people live. We have tons of beautiful empty land in this country but, modern life requires broadband and that's not well distributed yet.

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We have tons of beautiful empty land in this country

It's beautiful because it is empty.

I think we should fill up all the vacant lots and surface parking in the cities before we needlessly trample nature any more.

Agreed, but also...

There's like SO MUCH empty land. Growing up in the US, I thought the most empty things got was Ohio. But turns out, we're more like Russia - with the empty siberian frontier - than we are like the UK or something.

If everyone were evenly distributed, we'd still have <100 people per sq mile

Ohio has about the same overall population density as Spain.

You should take a trip to Australia sometime. The desert is sparse. Australia is more like an atoll, with everyone living on the edges. I've been in parts of the outback where my workmates and I were the only people for 10 to 100's of km's in every direction.

Isn't Perth the city that's farthest away from any other city in the world? Obviously that depends on the criteria which I can't remember, but the people I know from there have all complained that if you're bored of the city it's almost as easy to go to another country as it is to go to another city in Australia.

If you're still so far apart that you can't see your neighbors it's still "empty". The amount of space available in the United States boggles the mind when you actually go out there and drive for hours seeing almost no one. The damage to nature comes from large industrial activities like farming (fields or trees) or strip mining. Simply living there would actually help preserve that wilderness.

i use to wonder how you could detonate a nuclear bomb and no one notice, then I drove through New Mexico. The shear amount of nothing is hard to put in words. I spend a lot of time in far West Texas and Brewster county seems like beehive of activity compared to New Mexico.

My knee jerk reaction was to comment that modern life also requires other things like healthcare; but then I thought twice in that maybe some of the lifestyle diseases that drive in some measure the important placed on healthcare availability, maybe those core maladies and deleterious choices are encouraged by living in close proximity to large numbers of folks.

Which "lifestyle diseases" are you thinking of? Both obesity and diabetes are markedly more common in rural America compared to urban America, but there is a confounding factor of poverty.

Poverty is one thing. In a rural location, indeed, even in many suburban locations, you also sort of have to make yourself go out for a walk/run/hike because you're not going to just organically walk from place to place. (ADDED: Aside from house/yard work/farming/etc.) I live in a semi-rural location (nothing like what we're talking about here) and there is basically no reason that I have to do more than a minimum level of walking on a given day. (Leaving aside how big a difference that makes in the scheme of things.)

Yeah, I think there is no question that there are ways to integrate physical activity into your life in a rural setting, especially if you are going to make gardening, animal husbandry, or forestry integral to your routine. But, if you think that Starlink is a big inducement to move to the great deserts of western America, where you will sit with your laptop and your wifi, then it seems likely to be a net reduction in your physical activity, as you won't be walking a mile each way to the office, or to the café, or whatever.

Food is a much bigger factor than exercise.

(if you do physical work 10 hours a day maybe not, but walking a couple miles is a smallish breakfast)

Driving a couple hundred miles twice or once a year for dentist appointments isn't that hard. Yeah if you injure yourself badly you're just going to die, but that's kind of expected.

At the end of the day, everyone gets old and starts falling apart. That's when you need to be near specialists.

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