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Comment by apeace | Hacker News Reader

Are you saying that we have a choice between defending ourselves from asteroids, and offering low-latency internet to remote regions? Is there no way to have both?

(I know nothing about this.)

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Actually, since asteroid defense is infeasible with our current capabilities, our options are between relatively low-latency internet to remote regions (and causing headaches for astronomers), and nothing.

Is it infeasible? If we have 9 months to prepare we manage if wel fail to detect it for 8 due to StarLink it is to late.

Also StarLink is not for everyone, just for (globally speaking) rich people.

We can't determine the orbits of asteroids 9 months out with any certainty.

We don't necessarily need it to be certain to hit to prepare. It would just have to be significantly risky.

There's a Meta Connectivity thing called Terragraph that would do it, though i don't know its status.

I think the website cites urban but it's not really specific to that.

https://terragraph.com/

> Terragraph is a wireless technology designed to meet the growing demand for reliable, high-speed internet access in urban and suburban environments.

From https://terragraph.com/product/

I don't think this is a solution for remote areas.

https://tech.fb.com/engineering/2022/03/alaska-terragraph/

supposedly it was developed for remote areas. Hard to tell if there's something special about where it was deployed....maybe the notion of remote has to be still close to wired basestation hubs.

It’s last mile though which mostly doesn’t help except in medium density neighborhood where running wire/fiber to houses isn’t hard, just expensive. 5G is probably more viable in general for these sorts of cases.

i bet that's the disruption (5G) that might obviate Terragraph. I guess we'll see.

B612 foundation needs funding for space based observation.

We could have both, by having also mass produced and launched space telescopes. But who is gonna pay for them?

NASA paid $8.8 billion on just the James Webb. If they wanted to have a mass produced telescope for much cheaper, they could likely pay someone to produce a bunch of them for $8.8 billion. It wouldn't be as capable, but that's probably also not necessary.

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