It does, having all the humanity knowledge in your pocket is amazing and you can learn a lot which people do use to learn and get smarter. Sadly not everyone uses it that way and some just refuse to learn but that’s just loud minority (I hope).
I would argue that it’s contributed to the collective stupidity of humanity on a global scale. It’s had a lot of positive impacts as well, of course. I guess the negative ones just seem more palpable.
Yes, but now stupid people can easily collaborate with other stupid people, amplifying the echo-chamber-circle-jerk on a global, nearly instantaneous level. Furthering the stupid at a never before seen rate.
Has it, though? I grew up in the 80s, and I feel like I simply didn’t have a clue how ignorant people were or what batshit things people believed behind closed doors. Even when people disclosed to me their inner narrative, I feel like I just assumed they were joking or using extreme hyperbole.
The internet has made me realize … they weren’t joking. At all. They really believe that shit.
I’m approximately your age. I assumed the same thing. Hell, I thought crazy conspiracy theories were just people pretending “What if…” together.
In my younger days I would have been on a lot of bandwagons just to joke about the people who “didn’t get the joke”. It turns out I was the one that didn’t get it.
I would look at it from a different angle. Before the internet you had to have a lot of knowledge in different areas to be able to sound and behave smart, and also to make good choices.
Now you have knowledge readily available everywhere and there is much less incentive to learn things you don’t currently need, just to have it available in case you talk to someone about this topic.
This has become even more evident with AI, where you don’t have to skim through a lot of context to find your information, you just ask what you need and it is presented the way you need it right away.
While the general message of this meme is true, almost none of the internet actually goes through satellites. There are huge cables all around the world connecting the whole thing. And while launching rockets and deploying satellites is really cool, I think ocean crossing cables are impressive all on their own. Imagine a cable not only long and strong enough to cross an ocean, but also resting on the ocean floor, exposed to the environment and expected to work for decades. And to think the first of these cables was deployed back in 1858.
Well Starlink is yet to turn a profit, so I’m not sure it has any place to actually exist. I think it’s mostly there to fill up the SpaceX launch schedule. Especially since the Starlink stuff de-orbits in like 3 years, so they have to keep on launching.
Starling satellites have motors, and regularly boost their altitude to help overcome atmospheric drag. That figure is from when the satellite either runs out of fuel, or shuts down.
Yes this helps with positioning and orbital decay. Almost every satellite has this, it isn’t special to Starlink stuff. I know Elon makes it sound like they’ve invented the wheel here, but much of what they do has been done in one way or another.
There are a couple of factors which impact the lifespan of these satellites:
Technological progression. As they refine the technology and techniques they need to update the satellites with the latest and greatest. This means of course removing the old satellite and replacing it with a new one. Especially in the early days (now) this is a huge factor in replacing their stuff.
Failure rates. This is mostly due to radiation, but may also be due to other factors. The network is only as good as its nodes, so failing nodes need to be replaced fast. Radiation hardening is expensive and usually adds weight. This is a trade off between launch costs, the number of satellites they can fit in a Falcon 9 and lifespan of the stuff. Things like solar storms can have a huge impact, as Starlink found out the hard way.
Fuel consumption. Exact positioning is important for Starlink and with their VLEO orbits drag is a big factor. The satellite have very cool engines that help them stay in place, but only a limited fuel supply. There is a safe minimum fuel as regulation requires them to de-orbit safely, which takes a lot of fuel. So just running it till it’s empty is a no go, they need a good safety margin. They also don’t want to start any kind of Kessler syndrome kind of deal, so old spots need to be cleared out before new stuff can go in.
There are other factors, but these are the big ones. Starlink say they are aiming for a total replacement every 5 years, but in practice it’s more like 3 years. This is mainly due to the first batches being more prototype like, getting nearer to a final design recently.
With the proposed 11.000 unit constellation and the 5 year replacement rate, they would need more than 1 Falcon 9 launch each week. The costs are literally astronomical and the revenue has been only a fraction of what Elon sold the investors. I would be surprised if the plug is pulled on the whole Starlink thing.
People seem to think Starlink is the first and only one to try this, but it has been tried for decades and almost all have failed. The only success is with companies targeting niches, where there is little to no competition and premium rates can be had. For example reporters in the field broadcasting from a van to a satellite to be live on TV was a big niche. So far Starlink hasn’t delivered on a lot of the promises made by Elon and is destined to fail unless something big changes.
I didn’t realize the sats had such a short lifespan, I thought it was closer to eight years.
Although, there are hundreds of millions of people around the world who are potential customers, and I’ve spoken to a few people who either are, or plan to be, a customer. I do think the market exists.
Hundreds of millions would be a lot. I think you overestimate the demand for something like Starlink a lot. People who can afford to pay and would consider paying for Starlink tend to live in well developed countries. These countries typically have internet connections which are better than wat Starlink offers. Statistically most people live in cities, which also typically have good internet. People who live in lesser developed countries and don’t live in cities tend to not be able to afford or willing to pay for Starlink. Usually there are other cheaper options available, even though they would offer less bandwidth than Starlink. So the total market would not be hundreds of millions.
Starlink also offers poor bandwidth and latencies compared to local solutions. People who just use things like Facebook would rather have a low latency and low bandwidth solution than a high inconsistent latency and high bandwidth solution. Starlink is getting better, but the latency, especially in regions with few base stations (which is their best use case) will be inherently poor compared to wired or local wireless solutions.
Starlink themselves thought they would have 20 million subscribers in 2022. In reality they managed just about 1.5 million. (It’s not clear how accurate these numbers are and if they include non paying customers) They could get more people on board if they lower pricing, but then they need more customers to get the same revenue. Since the costs of building and launching the satellites, managing them and maintaining the ground part of the system are fixed and high, they need to generate a lot of revenue to turn a profit.
There may be large parts of underdeveloped areas in the US for example where people have the need for high bandwidth internet and are able to afford it and local solutions are lacking. But you end up with only 50 potential customers for one area of which maybe 5-10 people actually sign up. As soon as you hit something like a town, local wired and wireless internet solutions will outcompete Starlink easily. In a poorer country there may be more people to be found in rural areas, but if you only make the equivalent of $5000 a year, you probably won’t spend more than $1000 for Starlink. For those people the budget they have for internet would be more like $50 a year max.
And remember even if Starlink starts to operate at a profit, they aren’t out of the woods yet. They have had huge upfront starting costs, much more than they expected. Those costs need to be covered before investers actually get anything.
All the while they are competing with local internet solutions which are being rolled out fast all around the world. Something like 5G is rapidly cutting into the need for something like Starlink. As soon as subscriber count starts dropping instead of rising, it’s all over.
i'm in the outskirts of bumfuck. there's areas here with maximum dsl speeds under 1 mbit/sec. which the telco naturally sells at a higher price than the 40-60 mbit dsl in other parts of town because it's the only wireline service available in those neighborhoods (cable's ridiculously-priced service is their only competitor otherwise, but they don't cover every part of town)
But the cables aren’t exactly running in a straight line I think, so I would need to do some math and research to figure out if the circumference actually matters. Someone get on this!
I honestly don’t understand how people can think the Earth is flat in 2023. You can see it for yourself. Go to the coast of a sufficiently large body of water, and try holding a ruler up to the horizon.
I think at this point, it’s more a lifestyle and less a theoretical argument.
Yes, a flat earth doesn’t stand up against science. But also, for most people it doesn’t make a difference in their day-to-day life. So they have little to no incentive to ever tackle that notion.
If the disk had the thickness of Earth's diameter and through some black magic fuckery made it so that only the mass directly below you affected the force of gravity on you, then yes.
It's probably easier to make an FTL engine than to make any sense of flat earth theories.
There's probably some distribution of mass that would result in uniform gravity across the whole disk. I'm guessing there would need to be more mass near the edge to counteract the diagonal pull of the mass near the center on the area near the edge.
The problem is that in a flat plane with any amount of thickness, there will be always more mass diagonally than vertically, and it would still require a curve to evenly distribute the mass. I am by no means an expert on the matter, but from what I can recall, the only geometrical shape that allows for it is either a sphere or some complex hyperbolic curve, which is still not a plane.
If you look into it, you’ll realise the underlying theory quite obviously came to be when someone very smart tried to figure out how could a flat earth work without throwing all physics out of the window. It’s actually pretty neat. There are obviously details that can be tested for and the model disproven, but it does account for a lot. IIRC the basis is that the flat Earth is constantly accelerating at 1g, which provides gravity. Per theory of relativity you can accelerate at a constant rate for an arbitrary length of time, so that works. I think stuff such as phases of the Moon etc are also accounted for, though I don’t remember the details of that.
Really, people get too caught up in finding holes in the model when the most obvious flaw is that the whole thing requires tens of thousand people at least all knowingly covering this up without getting anything out of it. But if you look at it as a thought experiment, not an attempt to describe the reality, you’ll find that it’s really pretty cool. Or, it was cool, before idiots started to actually believe it.
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