99.9% of species that have existed on earth are already extinct. Climate change happens constantly over long periods. Our CO2 emissions will be background noise on a million year timescale.
Time to ignore the whingers and the NIMBYs and colonize the universe.
But there is the rest of the world, and if I'm told that the Africans should not have access to high-speed satellite Internet[0] so that the Europeans can use one specific method of looking at the stars, I don't find that convincing. In time, as we expand, space-based observation will become fairly feasible for everyone. And the satellites we have will decay to the Earth should we fail to keep them up there.
We will build Earth orbital structures and swarms, and we will build Sun orbital structures and swarms, and we will go to the stars, and it will be better for humanity as a whole.
0: https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2026/07/02/...
The article makes mention of specific endeavours, like the night-time mirror satellites, which are particularly disruptive to astronomy, and the general risks of high numbers of satellites.
The ability to do Earth based astronomy is something that is of value to all the peoples of Earth, and is mainly funded by the western nations because of their current position as the people with more money.
(that we currently have no way to remove)
is actually 32,000 not just 14,000
what we need is the investment for "space roombas" that go around bumping things out of orbit that are dead or did not de-orbit properly
the problem is all that atmospheric burnup creates a lot of toxic pollution
* https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-space-orbit-satellit...
I don't think blocking the view of the night sky is necessary for "human flourishing", actually. Your attitude reminds me of the Victorians, who saw their coal-smoke filled skies as a sign of virtuous progress.
More reasonable minds prevailed, in the end, and now most people have a more balanced view - with the understanding that progress and industry must be balanced with the ecosystem we live in and depend upon for life.
“You guys know we could basically live in a Star Trek style utopia if we get this right, right?”
“The DATA cenTERS are STEALING the water and breaking Taleckshual ProPerty LERRS!”
Like, I thought we were for piracy, and against capital colonizing the space of creative ideas? But I guess what a lot of people were fond of was feeling important.
What is happening now is we have all our existing structure, and the existing requirement to earn money to live within this structure, and the human creative output we want in our eventual utopia is used to train automata with the express goal to replace humans in those creative endeavors, removing the ability for humans to earn money by being creative themselves.
It is not hard to see things from this perspective when a significant portion of writing is becoming obvious slop, and your liberal friends are having a hard time getting hired or landing writing deals or selling artwork. I would feel less important too; I'm already feeling this way when I review a PR with obvious LLM-generated descriptions and comments that reference the prompt.
Ideally, feeling important wouldn't be pejorative. Ideally, we'd have a way for artists to have food and shelter and continue to produce art. The hopes that AI will cause this to happen are equivalent to hoping WWIII will come along and wipe out 2/3 of humanity so we can start over with United Earth and warp drives and replicators.
Kill. All. Trekkies. Now!
I frequently hang out in my driveway in the early evenings shooting basketball and listening to podcasts. I'll see easily several dozen satellites over the course of the hour or two that I typically stay out there. and I don't even live out in the country or anything. I think mostly people are just not aware (yet?) of how rapidly the number of satellites have grown in the last couple years.
Also, what about planes? Those also cause similar light streaks. Another understanding I currently hold is that there is already a method for removing these artifacts
A similar thread that links your examples together is how we all want to be the last person up the ladder. The last person to move into some neighborhood or into the last apartment complex. Or into a country. The last person to have internet access. Now we want to freeze how it is. Everyone after us threatens our experience.
An American with access to good internet for decades is annoyed that their stargazing session isn't what it used to be now that the city is growing and creating more light or that other people are getting to tech up.
Another episode of arrogant fantasy in the ponyworld.
Why don’t “we” just build more cell towers?
Why is littering our landscape with cell towers and power and fiber lines inherently better than putting this stuff in space?
Who is doing this allocation? Who is going to tell Pyongyang, Beijing or Moscow they can’t launch anymore?
This kind of attitude has for millenia been a dampener on human flourishing. My observation has been that those without empathy or foresight tend to attach themselves to these initiatives to obliterate our shared human heritage to satisfy their own ridiculous misconception of progress. Anti-intellectual, anti-curious, anti-social and so on because they've reached a local maxima in their ability to give a damn about what it means to live a good life and have chosen to spend their life in self-satisfied ignorance.
When the average African live like the average American we'll be truly fucked, probably even before that. We should raise the bottom for sure but we definitely need to cure the degeneracy of the top too
Technosolutionism is a cult. We either put the caps on ourself or nature will hard cap us anyways, in a much harsher way.
If I had to trace it to one source it would probably be the Club of Rome and Limits to Growth. Paul Erlich would be a close second with The Population Bomb.
Here’s a great podcast on the latter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn1gieFMuWI
This stuff sounds right because obviously you can’t have infinite growth in population or resource use on a finite planet. That means it won’t happen. The question is “how will it not happen?” The answer right now looks like “as people get wealthier they have fewer kids.” There are other possible answers like dematerialization of the economy which is also a thing.
Before the 70s this stuff would have been called far right and identified with ideologies like authoritarian eugenics and fascism. The 70s is when a lot of “volkisch” proto-fascist and crypto-fascist ideas got a lefty hippie makeover. The other big one is the idea that “natural” is inherently good.
I finally see this stuff getting some challenge from all across the political spectrum, even from the left. In previous decades you only ever saw it get challenged from the right or from what were once called libertarians.
More regulations would just have the result of cementing a monopoly for Spacex.
I think we should wait to see how the first satellite data centre works out. It seems fairly unlikely that it could be practical. It seems kind of nuts...
>Reflect Orbital, a US start-up, aims to launch a constellation of very large mirror-like satellites to provide sunlight at night, with reflected beams that span at least five kilometres on Earth's surface.
Straight up nuts with no practical value, even if it did work out.
Are they worth the cost/tradeoffs? I don’t know. But there is practical value to lighting up the night.
But stuff like mitigating the constant threat of big enough objects showing up on a collision course with earth should not be paused until those eye-catchers fall out of the sky. If there is something coming at us that can wipe out more than the stock price of one particularly space-enthusiastic company, we should like to know within a time period appropriate for our current planetary defense capabilities. Which will surely improve, over time - so maybe we can pollute the sky, later.
I don't really think this is a serious risk. This is a once-in-a-million-years kind of event.
Also, asteroid detection is not seriously affected by satellites. We can easily tell the difference between a moving satellite and a moving asteroid because of their speed.
Not to mention that’s not how it works. We regret burning so much fossil fuel but those who make huge profits from it prevent as much change as they can.
You can bet Amazon and SpaceX will do the same no matter how the rest of us regrets it
Do we put up long-distance power lines and wind farms even though they ruin the views? Do you tear down a forest to put up farmlands and suburbs? Do you build a dam to provide water for irrigation, even though it kills the fish and floods a valley?
Satellites are actually easier than most of those tradeoffs, because nothing lives in space and there's no nature to destroy. It only affects us.
How about we set a limit on how many satellites? That’s exactly how to balance
The purpose of most of these satellites is internet access where we already have less limited possibilities with less maintenance costs like constant replacement
And asteroids are an extremely rare threat in the first place. It's literally a once-in-a-million-years kind of event.
Source?
I wish I was joking.
So we can’t see the stars from Munich anymore? Yes, that’s depressing, but we’re not trying to reduce light smog in Munich right now, are we? Because all the buildings that have been build, all the streets and trains, also make it hard to see the stars.
More light is one of the things progress has always brought, and eventually we will just have to accept that we started building in the sky, too.
We should introduce a global agreement that commercial satellites must fall out of the sky within a few years to reduce debris. It should be an agreeable term since the debris hinders everyone doing business up there. Every nation is going to partially ignore it anyway, for military purposes for example. But that’s a different demand than a cap on the total number of satellites.
we aren't?
Bavarian Regulation on Light Pollution, Federal Nature Conservation Act, etc
Municipal lighting is regulated with light pollution in mind and allegedly you get fined over bright commercial lights at night
I recall around SpaceX 100th landing, that a day of just transatlantic flights was more than everything SpaceX had done to that point
And in all cases, if you produce the fuel using renewables then the CO2 output is trivially brought near zero.
> For the SpaceX satellite mega-constellation, he found that dozens of trails would appear in each image taken two hours into the night with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) at Paranal Observatory in Chile
Not to mention the satellites of Reflect Orbital whose sole purpose is reflecting sun light into night areas
The great observatories are marvels of engineering - a focused effort on technical mitigations to the satellite problem would likely push the problem out for decades into the future.
Two possible paths forward: 1. inserting a shutter into the beam path while a satellite is transiting the field of view of the telescope, or 2. (somewhat worse from an SNR perspective) terminating an exposure right before it's corrupted by a transiting satellite and starting a new exposure once the satellite has passed.
I for one would much rather see effort put into advancing telescope design than blocking advances of our use of space!
I agree with this and I'm not an astronomer btw.
What kind of astronomy knowledge is required to launch a satellite?
there are already several starlink competitors and even other countries planning to launch their own 1000-10,000 node networks
Nature takes care of this for us in LEO. I’ve seen no serious plans to put millions of anything anywhere else.
I also suspect that to be the case but in order to be more objective I wonder. What's the theoretical maximum bandwidth per square meter (or other unit area) that it can deliver?
AI adoption is a leadership failure more than a tech one right now. If you make people feel empowered with it, it can liberate work-free lives that humanity benefits from. If you use it to destroy people's livelihoods with no options it's not going to survive a revolution.
The world was already heading towards a dystopian landscape without AI. So many people on this planet live in a horrific dystopia right now, and here comes along something that might help them. Might give us what we need to stop global warming. I'd rather choose something with a 1% chance of working out than what we had before, 0%.
AI is a useful tool, but tools aren't always used to improve lives.
City killers? That size hits more often
> Asteroids with a diameter more than 30–50 metres (100–150ft) are large enough to make it through our atmosphere intact, however, and the chance of this happening is estimated to be around once in every 100 years.
> The damage from an impact of this size would be wide-ranging, and could wipe out an entire city if they were to impact a heavily populated area.
https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/chances-ast...
Luckily, the majority of the earth's surface is unpopulated. Most of these rocks hit the ocean or Siberia and cause few or no casualties. The odds of it hitting a major city are quite low.
I was there (cue Elrond meme), I remember.
And god forbid you were gay back then, or had an ailment that needed some high tech treatment, or needed to talk to someone on the other side of the planet for any reason, or wanted to have access to knoeledge.
We've come so far, and the people yapping about how "everything is the worst" are reactionary. Yes there are problems, I don't want to downplay them. But largely, until very recently, things were getting better en masse and zoomed out enough in time that trend will likely continue if we don't blow it all up or do something stupid like decide that science is too scary to do.
What I mostly see in these threads is "Capitalist Realism" - people can't even imagine things turning out some way other than "capital controls everything forever."
No UN body can command a nuclear sovereign. They ultimately continually consent to oversight.
Why not, though? If any country violates their limit, just issue a concern. If they ignore it, upgrade it to a grave concern. Then they will surely have to obey, I mean, it's grave concern we're talking about, what else they could do?
We may get that, but only if the ruling class want what the Victorians called a "folly": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folly
AI is wildly, wildly divergent in the possible futures it brings. It's really important to influence what happens, but don't limit the potential downside to only as bad as feudalism (neither neo-feudalist nor re-enacted): much worse monsters exist than the typical feudal lord.
(Was going to say "among those rulers who needed us alive to fight their wars and grow their food", but then I remembered Cambodia and Pol Pot).
If you really believe this (and I’m not saying I don’t, I just don’t have confidence in it), blocking domestic. datacenters doesn’t preserve that labour value. It just ensures whoever builds those datacenters controls production from afar.
Like, if AI really replaces human labour, does Africa and Europe having few AI datacenters protect it from America and China? Of course not. Not outside a symbolic level that even then would have to exist with the implied consent of the powers who produce.
xAI’s datacenters aren’t currently measurably replacing labour. So no, we’re not. If AI becomes economically competitive with broad sections of human labor, those who control it do have the power to replace humans.
But banning domestic datacenters doesn’t stop them from existing; it just stops them from existing here. If that precondition arises, that’s just a recipe for domestic deindustrialisation.
If you believe AI will replace human labor, blocking datacenters is silly. You want labor (or the public) to build and control them. I’m not convinced AI will replace labor, so I’m not yet at that step.
In the 80s, Rupert Murdoch built, in secret, a new fully computerised printing plant built in Wapping.
The workers went on strike, so he fired them. Didn't even lose a single day of output*:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wapping_dispute
That is what you should fear from AI. Not the data centres themselves, that we could all be fired and the rich lose nothing as a result.
* [citation needed] :P
Sure. But what would have been better for the Fleet Street workers. The UK banning computerised printing? Or the union owning one?
If AI is going to be to jobs in general as computerised printing was to newspaper printing, just blocking it doesn't make sense. That's my argument.
Commercial satellites are getting bigger and heavier. Launch that can put big and heavy in LEO can put big and slightly less heavy higher up. Add to that things like in-orbit propellant transfer and there is a good chance astronomy sees a golden age in the coming decades (in countries with space access).
I’m not dismissing the problem. Just this analysis as meriting any conclusions. It’s a start. But it’s only part of a full model of how these changes would affect astronomy.
Some sort of modular telescope array that could be launched in pieces and self-assemble in orbit. Something that improves in capacity as more pieces are added.
Everything seems to have stalled in this field, as if it's just waiting for a Starship which may never come.
I’d love to see an estimate of what a JWST-class telescope would cost to design, build and launch in a world maintaining a million-satellite fleet. My guess is less than $2bn.
Here's a visual to consider the implications of things you can do with actually one million satellites of the kind of size scale being discussed:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/BenWheatley/blog/refs/head...
Satellites don’t orbit on the ground, which makes the 40m spacing nonsense. And nobody proposes putting a million 120 kW satellites in a single orbit.
They really would never be that closely spaced. To approach those densities in a single orbital shell you’d need hundreds of billions of birds in orbit. Spread across all of LEO (and only LEO) we’re talking orders of magnitudes more satellites (like, quadrillions).
We’re only starting to truly mass manufacture satellites. A world with millions of satellites means one with lots of satellite production and design economies of scale. (Same for all manner of sensors and optics.)
> as if it's just waiting for a Starship which may never come
Or it may. We’ll know in a couple years. Building a scaling production system for Falcon right now would be silly.
And if Starship never works out, we probably don’t see millions of satellites. It’s a fundamentally tied problem, which is why I say the analysis is incomplete.
Not just the complexity of design, but also cost and complexity of cryo-vacuum testing hundreds of deployment mechanisms any one of whose failure critcially endangers the project. The mirror could also be conventionally manufactured versus requiring gold-plated beryllium [1].
