i wonder how easy it would be to build something that can reach the orbit and collide with the damn thing to deorbit it, if this nightmare ever becomes reality
This thing will never materialize. It’s a vapor-project for stupid people to pour money into.
For as long as there has been humankind, we have gazed up at the night sky, for comfort, for romance, for meditation, for curiosity, etc. It has been a core human experience, evolutionarily hard-wired into our humanity and psyche.
Now these Sociopathic Ferengi are going to steal that experience from every future human being, for profit.
Reminds me of the horrific ending to the movie Hancock (2008)
Cartoon Country.
A very unserious place with very serious problems.
Naw, the Simpsons was implying a far more useful sun blocking device. What the mirror is has much more impact and is in space.
I’m pretty sure I heard about this a while ago and the math just doesn’t math.
fcc is not a science based department. they should have no say at all over environmental endeavors
They don’t, which is why they can’t prohibit this satellite. It meets all their requirements regarding radio interference.
The Satellite should absolutely be stopped, but the FCC isn’t the agency to do it.
Does the EPA still exist?
Effectively not
I was just postulating to a friend, that if we built a huge array of solar panels, set out in a pattern not unlike solar sails, and deployed them out in-between the Earth and the Sun, we could block an appreciable amount of heat, which might act as a way to slow down climate change on our planet. Additionally this array could be connected in a grid, making it a huge space station, and energy source, where we could potentially use it as a base to start collecting and mining asteroids.
And then I read about these dumb mother fuckers who want to redirect sunlight back at the earth, making climate change worse, all to replace a couple flood lights? How fucking stupid is the person who brought this to reality? Jesus fucking christ.
Someone needs to read the Dyson Sphere paper: https://archive.org/download/dyson-1960-search-for-artificial-stellar-sources-of-infrared
(The paper was written as a sarcastic take on SETI sinking money into frivolous research of extra-terrestrial intelligence.)
thankfully the us is the only country that has a sky so only their government’s approval is needed 😁👍
This is an important point, and partly why you’re not seeing ads up in the night sky just yet.
I live in the city man, I’m not going to notice shit.
Why the fuck is every dystopian industrialist naming their shit after Tolkein? Does an artificial moon designed to fuck the natural order sound like something he would want to endorse?
Like many other things today, Peter’s fault
They don’t have the literacy / abstract thinking necessary to understand themes and like the ‘vibes’ of nerdy things being cool now.
These corporate jerks see themselves as Aragorn but in reality they’re Wormtongue
Elon likely never read Foundation, and it’s frustrating that he’s getting credit for it.
I do firmly put that on the people not doing their research, though. We should absolutely be bullying the shit out of people for being disingenuous in this way.
If I recall he was pretty anti fascist
So uh… Florida made “Geoengineering and Weather Modification Activities” illegal.
So are they going to launch that into space from another state, because one would think launching such out of cape canaveral would be off limits
“Geoengineering and Weather Modification Activities” illegal.
That’s only when “the Jews TM” do it. When its capitalism then fine! See they are still spewing carbon into the atmosphere in Florida but they haven’t banned internal combustion engines, and they keep burning coal!
There’s a lot of fuckery afoot as far as space goes. There are even companies trying to get world governments to allow them to put satellites in space so ads can be beamed into the night sky. I made a video about it if anyone’s bored.
The good news is that the scientific community fought back hard against it. You never understand how badass astronomers are until you read up on corporations trying to arse themselves into space.
I support jettisoning corporations into space.
If only we had these things called electric lights.
Yah, I can’t see anything that could go wrong with this. /s
Emphasis on I can’t see anything
Let’s beam down more heat! We totally need that on our rapidly heating planet.
Lets send that heat down in a large vertical column piercing the entire way thru the atmosphere!
Birds can cook themselves in it!
Nobody will get rained on near this beam, so less big money tied up in umbrellas!
And think of the tornados that will form!
This thing will create the need for so much progress to undo its effects!
Brilliant!
And while we’re at it let’s just push even more shit above the earth because there’s totally not already a whole bunch of stuff up there.
Well, technically there really isn’t much up there now.
I mean in low earth orbit it’s what, 99.999999999999999999999 % empty space? With the tiny fraction left being satellites.
By that logic you wouldn’t mind if I loosed a bag of mosquitos in your house, would you?
I love this comment so much and I love “loosed” as a past tense verb even more.
Well let’s run with that. If you put a single mosquito in my house, I would have a higher ratio of mosquito to air than low earth orbit currently has in its ratio of satellites to empty space. (Seriously)
It’s easy to remove any number of mosquitos from your house, 1 person and a swatter can get it done. It’s incredibly expensive, laborious and dangers to remove LEO satellites. If something malfunctions then it’s essentially a stuck there until shot or nudged down.
That’s disingenuous though. You have to compute the orbital tube volume to account for the collision risks.
Yeah that’s true, calculating the actual collision risk is a whole different thing.
It was really just a joke, cause you know space is bigger and more empty than most people realize. Because what I said was “technically” true, if not super meaningful in any way.
That said, orbit isn’t too crowded yet, more is definitely going up, a lot more. Truth be told, 50 years from now, the number of satellites orbiting earth could easily be in the hundreds of thousands.
We’re at what, close to 20k right now?
Won’t take 50 years.
And not every orbit is equally useful. Near misses are getting more frequent, and it only takes 1 to start a chain reaction.
Although this would also enable the alternate scenario of reducing incoming sunlight simply by turning them around. This project both doesn’t think far enough and much too far at the same time.
Also, we would need to finally abolish borders and create a world government for effective usage of such systems; this would enable the designation of areas where supercharged amounts of solar power are collected 24/7, while reducing solar input to areas experiencing heat waves.
It’ll only make a difference during the times in which it is being hit by a beam that wouldn’t otherwise hit the earth, since whatever it reflects will be offset by some shadow behind it. I wonder if, as a matter of orbital mechanics, it would be possible to make the satellite orbit in such a way so that it never casts a shadow and is always in the sunlight.
