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.
Billy lives out in Bumfuck, Idaho and thus needs Starlink.
We have high speed Internet here in bumfuck… But yes, statistically Billy is likely a dumbfuck if he lives here.
You might be bumfuck-nowhere-adjacent. But if you have DSL, fiber, or cable, you are not in bumfuck nowhere.
-Sent through my solar powered starlink connection from actual bumfuck nowhere. Where power lines don’t even exist.
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)
Maybe in some parts, but HughesNet and Starlink wouldn’t exist if they didn’t have people using them.
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.
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Good bot.
Does Lemmy have a bot voting bot? Just curious.
I guess the point still stands, I’m sure you need to account for the circumference of the earth when laying those cables
Yeah that’s true!
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!
When all else was equal they must have gone straight.
Now we’re just encouraging the flat earthers.
The cables are flat!
Worse for the eco-system than a satellite though
Fun Fact!: If you think the earth is flat, your brain is flat.
I specifically remember being told that the internet would make people smarter.
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.
Maybe the internet has shown us people that were already dumb but we just didn’t have a way of knowing they exist?
It gave them the means to find each other and also gave them a sort of megaphone to shout and spread their stupidity.
And then they voted, and turns out it was like half of the voting population.
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.
Used to be every village had their idiot. Now every idiot has their village.
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.
Internet can make people smarter, if they actually want to get smarter.
It’s the Disinformation Superhighway
I think I’m general it has, but it also makes the dumb ones very loud.
internet is mostly below or at ground level. we have underwater cables for international internet.
I thought it was implying he was in some hard to reach location, and they were pulling the stops out to connect the last guy on earth without internet.
I wonder where the notion that the internet is satellite based comes from? Sat TV?
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.
Clearly it’s just big water mountains
They alter all rulers to hide the flat earth!!!
It not flat! It’s concave! Flippin sheeple. Do your research!
/s
anyone who unironically says they believe in flat earth is a fed
Does gravity work the same on a disc, or is that just another piece of evidence they ignore?
I’ve seen them say that things fall “because of density”.
Like we fall down because we are heavier than air.
Like they think they’ve avoided the problem but they haven’t.
I mean obviously we fall down, because down is where the things fall to. /s
If we fell up, then up would be down!
Wake up sheeple! Gravity is an obvious lie from the NWO illuminati lizard people! We’re actually all implanted with small steel sheets in our feet at birth, and everything on the planet has a small amount of iron filings in too. The flat disc we live on is completely magnetic. That’s how we don’t fall off.
I thought everyone knew this!
I remember a guy arguing that flat Earth is constantly accelerated upwards on God’s will, and never reaches speed of light due to Einstein relativism. Was quite fun to listen to this unusual fusion
I think some of them reckon the disc is moving “forward” at speed .
That “forward” would be upwards? In does that people acknowledge relativity, but won’t accept geometry or gravitation?
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.
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.
Internet is made of tubes!
Now do the irony of the Allies and Neo-Nazis.
