Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

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Honestly "astronomers" have really started to annoy me, which surprises me because I love space and astronomy and star-gazing and such. I have bought multiple personal telescopes over the years, so I guess I even qualify as an amateur astronomer. But lately it seems I disagree with astronomers on any intersection of astronomy and politics. I put "astronomers" in quotes because of course I realize that "not all astronomers", but the consensus does seem to be there.

> Satellite internet constellations that provide affordable internet to millions of people bad because it might hurt terrrestrial astronomy.

> Infrastructure projects should not be built in sites that are good for astronomy because astronomy is apparently more important than energy and resource production[1].

> Much ado about nothing because some amateur astronomers thought a Tesla Roadster was an asteroid. Implications that companies are irresonsible / direlict in their duty for not ensuring that astronomers are well-informed.

Just overall I've been getting the feeling over the last couple years that "astronomers" have a severely inflated sense of self-importance. Or maybe I am the problem and I am under-valuing astronomy (or over-valuing everything else).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42668953

I had the same feelings as you.

I feel like serious issues are being brought up but there is also a bit too much righteousness attached to it rather than just pragmatic concerns. Maybe it's just the news reporter adding it though. News always want to add drama and specialty even to mundane events that might be solved easily. Sometimes throwing the discordia apple onto the dinner table.

In this case it seems it was just a mistake recognizing human made objects as asteroids. They mentioned it happened with Tesla Roster and also the Rosetta spacecraft. So yeah, it's pretty boring and the solution is very obvious. Have/improve a shared database of outer space objects.

Now I don't know if the journalist or some astronomer or someone else added the part with *A ’deplorable’ problem*

The definition of deplorable: "deserving strong condemnation; completely unacceptable" "children living in deplorable conditions"

Is this really a 'deplorable' problem? I really don't think there is any need to use such shaming and guilty oriented words for such a small matter. The amount of righteousness is just too much. It will cause people that would on the same side as you with just slightly different jobs/opinions to feel attacked and diminished. In my opinion this is what caused all big tech to flip from democrats to republicans. People over critized tech companies, painted them as villains. Everyone is just trying to do the best they can. It's better to be constructive, offer help, empathy, ask questions, dial back the righteousness. This way people don't feel attacked and punished but rather inspired to do better together.

it’s cheaper and more permanent to just lay fibre and copper to provide internet. we don’t need 3000 satellites launched every few years to do so.

i think you’re overinflating elon’s importance. (not that he designs and builds starlink, anyway)

Permanent yes. But cheaper?

A lot of the places served (as in actual customers) by starlink are in truly remote and difficult to reach places.

I know someone who uses it in the middle of private land surrounded by national forest, 5+ miles from the nearest paved road.

It doesn’t get electricity, and the last quote he was able to get was for $250k+ to attempt to run power from the local utility. But now with Solar….

And he’s not the only one in that region.

Using starlink for dense urban environments? Yeah that makes no sense. It also possibly doesn’t make any sense in suburban environments either.

But dispersed or remote areas? Pretty awesome.

LTE is sometimes a competitor in those situations, but there are a lot of people in those environments that don’t have good line of sight to a cell, but do get plenty of open sky, and Starlink is far superior for them than any other solution.

LTE over these remote areas is also a major capex, and involves a lot of environmental impact.

Hughes/Geo satellite sucks in both latency and bandwidth.

Most LTE data plans are also expensive for this type of thing, as any RV’er will tell you.

In many ways, this solves the ‘everyone must live in the big city to make good money’ problem, if coupled with remote work.

Where did I mention Elon Musk?

Apparently we do, otherwise there wouldn’t be a bunch of people for whom satellite internet is the only option.

Not to mention the difficulty of running fiber or copper to ships and airplanes.

If it’s better then why wasn’t it done?

You underestimate the difficulty of navigating lawsuits and access to common infrastructure. Look how difficult it was for Google to lay fiber in the few cities they have, they have been stopped in their tracks over and over because of lawsuits filed by their competitors (ATT etc).

Also fiber providers have very little incentive to build out fiber to rural customers. Why trench hundreds of miles just to hook up a few dozen people?

Starlink has the advantage of serving ALL rural customers with the same set of satellites. It’s actually very efficient when you think about how many millions of rural people are served by a common set of satellites.

I know this first hand because I would not have internet without Starlink and it has been a godsend. Before Starlink my whole neighborhood was SOL because it would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to trench out to us.

As my other message. I feel here the journalist (or someone else) like the godness Discordia just threw a golden Apple onto the table with written "To the best solution".

The result will be confusion, arguing, zero sum game thinking.

Yes, fibre optic is faster, yes it's cheaper. Yes I have it in my home. Yes I'm your friend. We are the same, we are all in the same boat. There are special uses for Starlink too. It can help countries where inneficient/corrupt governments/telcos create monopolies and don't want to provide fibre. Starlink will force all telcos to be at either faster or cheaper than Starlink. Healthy competition will make everything better. I will still use my FTTH 1Gbps fibre optic which is 3 times cheaper than Starlink at my own house. But I have a Starlink antenna as a backup, once a camion ripped the fibre optic cable (hanging from poles in my neighborhood) and I would have been 1 month without connection if it wasn't for Starlink. I use Starlink at the summer houses of my families, in the long run it's cheaper than paying DSL for 12 months since you can cancel Starlink whenever we can. We are all on the same boat, this beautiful planet called Earth, let's preserve it, but also, let's keep building awesome stuff, there is no limit to awesomeness.

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