How many hundreds of thousands or millions of km of trenches though do you think you actually need to serve the entire rural world? How long do you think that would take? That 750km trench might only ever serve 500-1000 people, hence why it never gets built.
Starlink and the LEO constellations provides the capability for anywhere in the world that can clearly see the sky, to have internet. Today. The next stage of the network will make that capable of serving everyone in rural areas instead of having some cell capacity limits on people as the V3 dishes provide 10x the capabilities per dish, and 20x per launch. The only reason not everyone has access to it is because of geopolitical reasons and licensing, but it could technically serve the entire worlds rural areas today.
For the non land areas you can’t just wish wash that away with ‘future tech’ or it’s not important. Keeping hundreds of thousands or millions of drones up in the middle of the oceans isn’t going to happen. Sea internet is just as important to the millions of people who work or live on the sea as it is to the rural people at home. The dramatic improvement in quality of life at people at sea is also improved, and has even been noted by the military.
Surprisingly, Starship is actually ‘clean’ in terms of air pollution. It’s exhaust is just CO2. They could in the future pull CO2 out of the air via solar to make the methane making it neutral. So it’s still a global warming issue, but it’s not tossing other noxious compounds into the air. It’s also a tiny fraction of current airline usage. There’s more CO2 emissions from 1 day of transatlantic flights, than it would take to maintain and grow starlink each year with starship.
Edit: and in case you missed it, starship is operational now. They launched 10 functioning satellites on the last launch. Its a long ways off from being fully and rapidly reusable, but it can deploy payloads now.
I dont know exactly how much trenching would be required, but someone does, because it is the exact same number as they already did to run the phone lines, possibly less due to dramatically superior fiber length limits. That was a massive success that can also not be wish-washed away. It never gets built because the people that would have to build it bought and bribed the people that can make them, and now from Starlink, as well; that is the problem that needs solving.
When we finally do run those fibers, if ever, they are good for decades, and repairing them is a trifle compared to anything involving shuttle launches. The Starlink constellation is grievously costly in uncaptured externalities. I am perfectly fine with solving non-critical problems,such as Internet access at sea, so long as they cover all of the costs of something I consider a tremendous waste, including the environmental cleanup from burning tons of rocket fuel.
Furthermore, future tech was only one of multiple proposed solutions to Internet access at sea. We can do it right now, badly, with existing technologies, and it would improve with time, like every human endeavor in history has when motivated.
I believe that you are viewing the value proposition as it is on its face, but that company (among many) is benefitting tremendously from government subsidy and structurally ignoring those externalities. Even a child knows that it is wrong to make a mess and leave it for someone else to clean up, but every time we let a company burn something or throw something away without paying the real costs of doing that, we’re rewarding that misbehavior. I would not be even slightly surprised if Starlink was in the top 5 of corporate air polluters; launching a rocket takes an amount of energy that is incomprehensible to the average person, and they have to do it repeatedly forever, or Starlink not only stops working, but their “infrastructure” in space becomes worthless. A buried fiber would still be there after the people that placed it are dead.
We never actually solved the telephone line problem globally. This is a global issue, not a US issue or western country issue. Some countries just skipped right over it in areas it was simple to do and went straight to wireless after struggling for decades without connectivity, but still the rural areas rely on some form of satellite internet.
Again, you seem to be worried about these launches, but it will be less than 1 day of transatlantic flights each year to maintain the network. The fuel is methane and oxygen which as I said only has CO2 as a pollutant. If that’s the cost to provide global internet coverage that’s nothing. It’s more for Falcon 9, but its absolutely tiny on the scale of what we do and what it provides.
The unknown externalities are what does burning things up in the atmosphere do, and that is something we don’t truly have an answer today. SpaceX already solved the throwing away 1st stages each launch which every other launch provider does, and are close to solving the 2nd stage as well. If they can solve the 2nd stage, then we really are only talking about whatever damage the burned up satellites do. In the meantime, they burn up the 2nd stages as well as the satellites which everyone else also does, or leave it in a dead orbit.
We could have solved the telephone lines globally, though. The USA gave a beautiful example of how to get it done in one of their sadly few historic commendable examples set for the rest of the world. The fact that it was not done more broadly was due to people not demanding more and better from their governments that could easily have done the same; it gets cheaper and easier every year. The lack of Internet connectivity in remote areas is a problem, but more importantly, it is a symptom of a bigger problem of government neglect in infrastructure. Starlink is a big, inefficient, expensive, polluting, astronomy-interfering, high-maintenance, unilateral private international remedy to a symptom. It’s very easy to get distracted by problems that are really symptoms of other problems, especially when media is quick to point the cameras at those symptoms, and much less so at the bigger, tougher societal problems.
Solving this particular problem with physical lines to everywhere that is possible is surely dramatically less costly than launching satellites to cover the same area. Fiber lines are also functionally permanent infrastructure; they are physical appreciating assets akin to real estate. Satellites are depreciating assets with relatively short lifespans, and are active components frequently requiring both routine and emergency maintenance while fiber cabling is just a hunk of inert matter that stays the same functionally forever. With something so inefficient, wasteful, and problematic to other industries, it is insightful to weigh the pros and cons to consider if it is still worth doing. Extreme measures like these may be appropriate for military or even seafaring purposes, but rural Internet is a stretch when there are cheaper, cleaner, faster, more permanent, and overall better alternatives. Even at sea, technology like this serves much more appropriately as a stopgap until something more practical can be put in its place, but Starlink’s monopoly in this market combined with a friendly and protective domestic government to operate in ensures that better, more permanent solutions will never be pursued.
I often find it beneficial to try to take fresh perspectives on issues like these, taking a step back from the world we are in and acting as an outside observer. In this case, maybe something like this: We have had conductive wire for well over a century, and fiber optics for well over half of one, but we are launching satellites into space, a hostile environment that none but a handful of humans have ever been and can only recently even dream of going one day, repeatedly in perpetuity, to connect locations together, often even locations on the same continent. Then, the complex and costly devices we’ve deployed in vast numbers are very soon irrevocably destroyed.
In that context, if the problem could be solved by doing little more than digging a whole bunch of long shallow trenches, its a pretty hard sell to convince me it is better solved with an unending amount of the highest-tech machinery and industry the world has ever seen. We’ve dug rivers and moved mountains for thousands of years, sometimes just for the bragging rights. This is no problem! We already saw fit to build roads to all those places, and fiber is of comparable infrastructural value while much less costly and lower-maintenance than roads.
How many hundreds of thousands or millions of km of trenches though do you think you actually need to serve the entire rural world? How long do you think that would take? That 750km trench might only ever serve 500-1000 people, hence why it never gets built.
Starlink and the LEO constellations provides the capability for anywhere in the world that can clearly see the sky, to have internet. Today. The next stage of the network will make that capable of serving everyone in rural areas instead of having some cell capacity limits on people as the V3 dishes provide 10x the capabilities per dish, and 20x per launch. The only reason not everyone has access to it is because of geopolitical reasons and licensing, but it could technically serve the entire worlds rural areas today.
For the non land areas you can’t just wish wash that away with ‘future tech’ or it’s not important. Keeping hundreds of thousands or millions of drones up in the middle of the oceans isn’t going to happen. Sea internet is just as important to the millions of people who work or live on the sea as it is to the rural people at home. The dramatic improvement in quality of life at people at sea is also improved, and has even been noted by the military.
Surprisingly, Starship is actually ‘clean’ in terms of air pollution. It’s exhaust is just CO2. They could in the future pull CO2 out of the air via solar to make the methane making it neutral. So it’s still a global warming issue, but it’s not tossing other noxious compounds into the air. It’s also a tiny fraction of current airline usage. There’s more CO2 emissions from 1 day of transatlantic flights, than it would take to maintain and grow starlink each year with starship.
Edit: and in case you missed it, starship is operational now. They launched 10 functioning satellites on the last launch. Its a long ways off from being fully and rapidly reusable, but it can deploy payloads now.
I dont know exactly how much trenching would be required, but someone does, because it is the exact same number as they already did to run the phone lines, possibly less due to dramatically superior fiber length limits. That was a massive success that can also not be wish-washed away. It never gets built because the people that would have to build it bought and bribed the people that can make them, and now from Starlink, as well; that is the problem that needs solving.
When we finally do run those fibers, if ever, they are good for decades, and repairing them is a trifle compared to anything involving shuttle launches. The Starlink constellation is grievously costly in uncaptured externalities. I am perfectly fine with solving non-critical problems,such as Internet access at sea, so long as they cover all of the costs of something I consider a tremendous waste, including the environmental cleanup from burning tons of rocket fuel.
Furthermore, future tech was only one of multiple proposed solutions to Internet access at sea. We can do it right now, badly, with existing technologies, and it would improve with time, like every human endeavor in history has when motivated.
I believe that you are viewing the value proposition as it is on its face, but that company (among many) is benefitting tremendously from government subsidy and structurally ignoring those externalities. Even a child knows that it is wrong to make a mess and leave it for someone else to clean up, but every time we let a company burn something or throw something away without paying the real costs of doing that, we’re rewarding that misbehavior. I would not be even slightly surprised if Starlink was in the top 5 of corporate air polluters; launching a rocket takes an amount of energy that is incomprehensible to the average person, and they have to do it repeatedly forever, or Starlink not only stops working, but their “infrastructure” in space becomes worthless. A buried fiber would still be there after the people that placed it are dead.
We never actually solved the telephone line problem globally. This is a global issue, not a US issue or western country issue. Some countries just skipped right over it in areas it was simple to do and went straight to wireless after struggling for decades without connectivity, but still the rural areas rely on some form of satellite internet.
Again, you seem to be worried about these launches, but it will be less than 1 day of transatlantic flights each year to maintain the network. The fuel is methane and oxygen which as I said only has CO2 as a pollutant. If that’s the cost to provide global internet coverage that’s nothing. It’s more for Falcon 9, but its absolutely tiny on the scale of what we do and what it provides.
The unknown externalities are what does burning things up in the atmosphere do, and that is something we don’t truly have an answer today. SpaceX already solved the throwing away 1st stages each launch which every other launch provider does, and are close to solving the 2nd stage as well. If they can solve the 2nd stage, then we really are only talking about whatever damage the burned up satellites do. In the meantime, they burn up the 2nd stages as well as the satellites which everyone else also does, or leave it in a dead orbit.
We could have solved the telephone lines globally, though. The USA gave a beautiful example of how to get it done in one of their sadly few historic commendable examples set for the rest of the world. The fact that it was not done more broadly was due to people not demanding more and better from their governments that could easily have done the same; it gets cheaper and easier every year. The lack of Internet connectivity in remote areas is a problem, but more importantly, it is a symptom of a bigger problem of government neglect in infrastructure. Starlink is a big, inefficient, expensive, polluting, astronomy-interfering, high-maintenance, unilateral private international remedy to a symptom. It’s very easy to get distracted by problems that are really symptoms of other problems, especially when media is quick to point the cameras at those symptoms, and much less so at the bigger, tougher societal problems.
Solving this particular problem with physical lines to everywhere that is possible is surely dramatically less costly than launching satellites to cover the same area. Fiber lines are also functionally permanent infrastructure; they are physical appreciating assets akin to real estate. Satellites are depreciating assets with relatively short lifespans, and are active components frequently requiring both routine and emergency maintenance while fiber cabling is just a hunk of inert matter that stays the same functionally forever. With something so inefficient, wasteful, and problematic to other industries, it is insightful to weigh the pros and cons to consider if it is still worth doing. Extreme measures like these may be appropriate for military or even seafaring purposes, but rural Internet is a stretch when there are cheaper, cleaner, faster, more permanent, and overall better alternatives. Even at sea, technology like this serves much more appropriately as a stopgap until something more practical can be put in its place, but Starlink’s monopoly in this market combined with a friendly and protective domestic government to operate in ensures that better, more permanent solutions will never be pursued.
I often find it beneficial to try to take fresh perspectives on issues like these, taking a step back from the world we are in and acting as an outside observer. In this case, maybe something like this: We have had conductive wire for well over a century, and fiber optics for well over half of one, but we are launching satellites into space, a hostile environment that none but a handful of humans have ever been and can only recently even dream of going one day, repeatedly in perpetuity, to connect locations together, often even locations on the same continent. Then, the complex and costly devices we’ve deployed in vast numbers are very soon irrevocably destroyed.
In that context, if the problem could be solved by doing little more than digging a whole bunch of long shallow trenches, its a pretty hard sell to convince me it is better solved with an unending amount of the highest-tech machinery and industry the world has ever seen. We’ve dug rivers and moved mountains for thousands of years, sometimes just for the bragging rights. This is no problem! We already saw fit to build roads to all those places, and fiber is of comparable infrastructural value while much less costly and lower-maintenance than roads.