I have conflicting feelings about this.
Do it. Maybe then we could finally close the book on this whole Russia thing and see what grows from its ruins once they cool down.
I promise you killing a trillionaire’s objectively worthless pet project that is pretty universally hated outside Ukrainian military, the RV community, and the poorer end of the Yacht community is not going to end in any retaliation besides a strongly worded letter about temporarily causing additional space debris.
objectively worthless pet project
Regardless that Musk is a nazi-saluting asshole, lots of folks in working class rural regions around the world would disagree with calling it worthless. As an example, I visited southern Alaska recently and Starlink is very much in use there on working class small homes.
While starlink is a relatively cheap alternative to other satellite providers, and at one point provided a better experience, both the price value and experience has continued to degrade over time. It would be a great UN-provided project. Genuinely we should have a similar system (better engineered and designed) available to be used by anyone at cost. But SpaceX is a public company, it’s only going to continue to enshittify and will eventually become a worse value consideration than alternative satellite providers; it’s already enshittified with many customers reporting consistently double the ping and half the download speeds from their original experience.
It’s not the idea of a truly globally accessible internet that makes it worthless, it is the fact it is being done by a for-profit publicly-traded company owned by a trillionaire. Any one of those three things would mean the product is guaranteed to get worse eventually, all three mean it is guaranteed to get worse as quickly as possible.
it’s already enshittified with many customers reporting consistently double the ping and half the download speeds from their original experience.
I don’t think that is an example of enshitification in this case. In the technical world there are measurements for this call SLAs (Service Level Agreements). This means that if you pay for a specific service with contractually delivered performance. The service needs to deliver at least that level of performance, or you are entitled to refunds/credits/resitution for the service provider not meeting their obligations.
Now, just because a service provider is required to deliver a minimum of service, they can (and frequently do) provide even better service than they are obligated to. This is pretty typical of technology services where a new platform is being built out and there is lots of spare capacity as users are just being onboarded. I have no doubt that there were Starlink users that got fantastic performance when only a fraction of the network was in use by others. If this is their baseline, then from their perspective, they are getting less than they did before. If the performance still meets what was sold to them contractually, then they’re still getting what they paid for they’re just not getting a whole bunch more they never paid for.
It’s not the idea of a truly globally accessible internet that makes it worthless, it is the fact it is being done by a for-profit publicly-traded company owned by a trillionaire. Any one of those three things would mean the product is guaranteed to get worse eventually, all three mean it is guaranteed to get worse as quickly as possible.
That’s … a pretty questionable definition of “objectively worthless” then. By that definition all products or services from non-government owned companies would meet that definition of “objectively worthless”. I’m confident that moves the definition from “objectively worthless” to “subjectively worthless”.
You’re very welcome to hold that opinion, but I think the majority of its subscribers would disagree with you.
A guy can dream.
temporarily causing additional space debris.
Any level of additional space debris is risky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
Is Kessler syndrome anything more than just theoretical? Like… isn’t stuff supposed to all burn up in the atmosphere — eventually?
Not until it decays from orbit. We have an incredible amount of junk in orbit.
https://orbitalradar.com/space-debris-statistics
It’s theoretical in that it hasn’t happened yet, but it’s a chain reaction it’s pretty basic math, if the debris up there generate new debris by hitting other satellites faster than the debris burn out then it’s pretty certain it will happen.
Fair, but I still feel like the effect might be overplayed. Any impact is going to generate a lot of heat, and any debris is going to have a lot less structural integrity.
Let’s say you actually wanted to inflict Kessler Syndrome on an alien species. You’d find that the altitude makes the difference between hours and centuries of syndrome effect. Debris at 200-500km might get you a few months, whereas 1200-1500km might get you a few centuries. The difference would be atmospheric drag, right?
Kessler Syndrome is also a chain reaction. You wouldn’t deploy the material, it needs to already be there [in the form of satellites]. But modern practice is trending toward lower operational orbits for large constellations, isn’t it?
I feel like you’d need to deploy satellites with a pretty awesome combination of sheer throughput and sheer ignorance, in order to create the right conditions for a lock-in risk. Worst case, in our current situation, I feel like we would have occasional crashes leading to small localized debris clouds that mostly disburse without causing a cascade.
Why would anything else be more plausible is my main question. Why would so much material be in just the right altitude to cause such a dramatic effect? You’d just don’t build important things in such risky ways.
Debris don’t need structural integrity, it’s travelling around 10 times the speed of a bullet even with a small mass traveling at ~8 km/s anything it hits is fucked.
localized debris clouds
A low other orbit satellite travels around earth every 2 hours, any debris it generates will be similar, there is no such thing as a localized debris cloud.
Why would so much material be in just the right altitude to cause such a dramatic effect?
Capitalism
