Just need the Kessler syndrome to put a stop to it all.
this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
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Does that apply to LEO? Seems to be self clearing in the medium term
I was a space kid, followed every space shot since 1965, was a super fan of Apollo 11, I had a subscription to Nat Geo growing up, just for the Space photos.
So I can't believe I'm saying this: Maybe we've gone far enough for now, and we should have a moratorium on space for the next 50 years.
We should concentrate on Earth for awhile, dontcha think?
This isn't really space science related, just commercialization. And about focusing on Earth: we should let scientists work on what they're passionate about, IMO they'll be more motivated to research their field of choice
Not gonna happen. Not with the effective altruist cult running things.
I don't think you are using altruist right, or I am missing some sarcasm here.
I've been really passionate about space. My bday is on the anniversary of the moon landing, and my one aunt has always reminded me of the fact. My great grandfather worked for NASA and my aunt gave me his stargazing binoculars that his brother gave him when he got hired at NASA. That part of my family instilled a huge love of science in me, esp space stuff. I wanna go to space more than anything, but I don't have the brains or constitution to be an astronaut. So I just daydream, stargaze, and write poems about the cosmos.
maybe just for this one guy you know
I dunno, every engineer not working on space almost certainly ends up optimizing some sort of ad delivery system. The tech industry is almost completely enshittified.
I was thinking more like Climate Change and Infrastructure and whatnot and suchlike.
That’s great, but that comes from funding those things, not shutting down a different industry. It’d be better to shut down non-productive industries like bombing brown kids in the Middle East.
Right. Elon hires people on the basis they'll be making Mars travel possible, but that Starship is really for dumping metal all over the night sky.
Elon Musk is such a goddamned literal supervillain that he managed to make the theme of Firefly wrong.
Apparently, they can take the sky from you.
Ads on the fucking moon are going to do it for me.
If we get that we'll also definitely get a Moon Banksy.
... 'Bansky goes to Space' ...
That would make for quite a story.
That's where you draw the line?
(Also, say hi to your chickens for me)
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Billionaires don't give a fuck about anyone but themselves, not even their kids. And, we've all agreed to let billionaires run the world, it seems.
We're just a few millimeters away from revoking that agreement though. There's not that many of them.
They might put a million satellites into orbit, but they're certainly not going to be orbital data centers. At least not as we currently understand data centers. The idea that space is cold and therefore a great place to put data centers that get hot is the idea of a stoned moron talking out of their ass. Space is a vacuum, you know what else is a vacuum, the part of your portable coffee mug that keeps your beverage warm or cold for ages, because vacuum is a crazy good insulator. Just because space is cold doesn't mean the heat from an orbital data center can dissipate into it. This dumb idea is never going to happen unless data canter technology improves to the point where they aren't environmental disasters anymore.
They already have orbital, distributed, data centres.
It's called Starlink. It's already got the equivalent of entire cabinet worth of hardware in a single satellite.
Scott Manley has been doing the maths and shown how it's already incredibly viable with current tech, especially with how they can already cool 20kw of Starlink sat just fine.
The biggest constraints on earth are town planning costs and delays/time, and of course power. (most DC cooling systems are closed looped)
Starlink satellites carry antennae. That's all they are. Not serious computational equipment.
Edit: so his power argument is mostly fine. Different components do dissipate different amounts of heat at the same power. Antennae will not run as hot as GPUs, the fact they radiate power by design helps here. However, even if you could use all a v2 satellite's power generation for compute, you need 35 sattelites per MW of compute. So at the lowest estimate 35000 for a GW data centre. For 2024 data centre capacity (47 GW computed from 415 TWh used) you need around 1.6 million sattelites. Now you need to network a vast cloud to get reasonable inter GPU performance.
The required orbit would probably mean a whole strip of earth gets insane light pollution, due to the reflectivity of so many sattelites jammed into the narrow orbit. Note that each satellite is about as bright as a star visible to the naked eye.
Edit edit: The lifetime of a data centre GPU is around 1-2 years for serious uptime. The sattelites are meant to have a 5 year lifetime.
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It's so infuriating... I occasionally do astrophotography and it's getting to the point where any long exposure just has satellite streaks everywhere... Fuck Musk.
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LEO satellites decay very quickly every one of them will burn up in the atmosphere within 10 years. They need to be replaced constantly. As soon as spacex goes out of business these will all fall out of the sky.
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