The Gaming Den

Elon Musk idiot force for evil with an alt version Midas touch that makes everything he comes in contact with catch on fire and explode? Or deep anarcho-communist sleeper agent sabotaging the capitalist myth of meritocracy?

Whatever there are ALWAYS fans of his somehow crawling out of the wood work like wood eating weevil grubs. And they are always praising him with "yeah SURE that project caught on fire and exploded BUT actually he is a genius because of the project you AREN'T talking about right now!"

Which inevitably when you look at it, appears to be starting to catch on fire and explode even as someone points at it and says "See, not yet exploded!"

And the number one project he gets covering praise for all his other burning exploding failures over is, in my experience, Starlink. There is always someone who knows nothing who is ready to praise fucking Starlink.

Now I'm a space technology amateur, not even that, a disinterested fucking layman. It took me a quick read of a summary of the Starlink project years ago for me to think two things about it.

"This sounds like an example of massively destructive waste and inefficiency."

"This sounds like it would trigger the Kessler Effect."

And I want to point out that even after years, even after a lot of excuses by amateur space fan hobbyists who SHOULD know more than I do but these days seem to be INFESTED with the last and most loyalist moron Elon fan boys.

STILL if you go looking up what the experts have to say both my initial reactions seem to be dangerously correct.

Starlink IS wildly inefficient, needlessly so, and just NOT how you should set up a satellite internet service (which in most cases is also not how you should set up an internet service provider PERIOD). Its literally burning vast sums of money in the form of a massive amount of deorbiting satellites, already racking up increasing numbers DAILY and this is considered to be a VERY narrow end of a VERY wide wedge of how many will deorbit.

Deorbiting so many in fact that the burn ups alone are dramatically changing the makeup of the stratosphere. In ways that make relevant experts deeply uncomfortable.

Lets note that at SOME point they actually plan for a few hundred if thousands or more of these fucking bad ISP machines TO DEORBIT AND BURN UP AT THE SAME TIME.

And apparently experts on Kessler Syndrome ARE still saying, yeah, the risk is there, indeed still rising, in fact its getting to insanely dangerous levels. In fact, even now it probably would just take one unlucky collision. And Starlink satellites have been performing emergency avoidance maneuvers somewhere in the tens of thousands of times.

But also about nowish the number of satellites (just starlink nonsense ON THIER OWN) is approaching the sorts of numbers Kessler originally estimated for a guaranteed triggering of the effect. (Something predicted somewhere WELL before the eventual total number of Starlink satellites Elon wants in the same orbit simultaneously will be reached)

Elon fans dismiss this saying the orbit is too low for the Kessler Syndrome. But that isn't in line with what the experts actually say or even apparently with what the Kessler effect even IS, since its about the increasing amount of debris outpacing natural de-orbits which IS possible at that orbit, and increasingly likely.

In fact, apparently due to atmospheric changes, now suddenly EVEN MORE LIKELY at that orbit.

NO ONE seems to talk about this. Internet space nerds are too afraid of letting their SpaceX security blanket go and are too racist to become China apologists/boosters and apparently feel like being Elon Musk apologists/boosters is somehow more savory.

And general internet people are more likely to decide that this one time they personally had a hard time getting broadband and got a deeply mediocre version of it from Starlink so it MUST be a good thing, even though they inevitably live in a first world nation where they SHOULD have been demanding fucking fiber networks to their fucking door which is the fucking CORRECT way of providing ISP services ESPECIALLY in fucking first world nations with the state and even fucking corporate capacity to do so.

Certainly ground based fiber optic networks IS the objectively efficient, functional, safe and correct way to do it without taking thousands of satellites, the stratosphere, an entire orbit, and possibly even human access to satellite technology in general, then setting them all on fire and watching them explode.

Even if you MUST do satellite based ISPs, starlink IS FUCKING DOING IT WRONG. It's old hat technology that's done in higher orbits with almost infinitely fewer satelite launches.

But some dumb fucker let handsy special needs man-child Elon touch space technology, which means all of space technology (in the West) is now on fire, and about to fucking explode/already exploding. But he STILL HAS SOME FANS even among the subgroup of Western Space Nerd Perverts. Somehow.

And Amazon is getting in on it, planning their own Version.
And Apple.
And not just American Corps. No.
GERMANY is actually planning on creating an Alternative as well.

Because THE IDEA AND EFFECT IS SO FUCKING WORTH IT!
Especially paired with Solar at home or small and portable, this is a literal game changer in terms of information network coverage.
No more need for waiting untill some ISP decides that your probably quite literal NECK OF THE WOODS is suddenly worth covering.
Just . . Go, buy for less than you probably spend on Fuel in a year and DONE! High Speed and if not low then at least acceptable latency Broad Band Internet STRAIGHT TO WHERE EVER YOU WANT / NEED IT!
See the Ukraine War and how it changed that alone.
And Germany is allready paying for a replacement of their Star Link Terminals in case Musk decides to stop supporting them.

The fact that it took a literal Billionaire Nerd to go:"why are we not doing this? fuck it, i want it, i have the money, we are doing it!" is the sad part about it.
Because if the Governments of the World had just come together to do it? And do it Properly? THAT WOULD BE A TRULY WORLD WIDE WEB!
And if you can make one of those do contact to ISS or maybe even up to da mun? EVEN MORE BETTERER!

And probably less problematic because it can then be done right. With presumably way less sattelites. Which do not simply fall like Lucifer did every few days.

Do you know how fucking expensive it is to get internet laid somewhere?
My Mother IN NOTHERN GERMANY MIND YOU did NOT have Internet less than 3 years ago in her House.
BECAUSE NO ISP WAS GOING TO DO IT! EVEN LTE WAS NOT AN OPTION BECAUSE IT WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN FINANCIALLY VIABLE FOR ANY ISP!
The only reason why she now actually has Fibre Optic Wire INTO HER LIVING ROOM is because the local water provider decided to use a little
Loophole in the rules and became an ISP themselves and deicded to put the cables THROUGH THEIR WATER INFRASTRUCTURE ALLREADY IN PLACE!
Basically using sewers as really big cable canals. And then it was STILL almost 5k€ to get the connection from the street / sewer into the house.
And it only happened THAT "CHEAP" because they had to offer it that cheap to get all people on board in that street because otherwise they could
not have done it even using the loophole of their own infrastructure . .

Another Colleague of mine actually had to pay 10k+ because of the distance from the street to his House IN HAMBURG GERMANY!
Because he IS actually living in his neck of the wood . .
And he had to take an exclusive contract for basically at least a decade for 2 End Points so he could get the reduced price distance combined to make it work.

If none of those had had those opportunities, BOTH would right now be using Star Link!
Because Star Link was Available not that much later and not that much more expensive.

Yeah this is really dumb. It is not in fact worth Keppler syndrome and/or extremely metallic atmosphere to have slightly cheaper sattelite internet.

And in fact, literally, you would have to have an entire goddam fucking house with electricty for it to even kind of be worth it, which means there's a house that people could have been connecting broadband to with the same resources that were instead used to launch sattelites.

In the extremely niche case of "a warzone" it may in fact be useful, but it's probably still fine to just have higher up satellites. But it is in fact totally possible to just connect houses that are already eletrified to broadband internet for much cheaper. Your own example is providing more people faster internet access for cheaper then launching a bunch of satellites, and saying that's too expensive, but it manifestly was not.

That corporations do not think they can profit from something does not mean it is actually prohibitively expensive.

Are you sure you mean keppler syndrome and not Kessler Syndrome btw?

And no, just because you have electricity to a house does not mean it is easy to hook it up to broadband as well.

Stahlseele wrote: ↑

Sat Apr 05, 2025 11:55 pm

Are you sure you mean keppler syndrome and not Kessler Syndrome btw?

And no, just because you have electricity to a house does not mean it is easy to hook it up to broadband as well.

I am not talking about whether it is "easy" or "hard" to connect houses to the internet, though it is in fact objectively way easier then launching 30 thousand satellites in all cases. I am saying that houses do not appear spontaneously from the ether when someone decides the want internet.

If a house has electricity, then it is a known existing location that people and governments are completely aware of. Which means that they COULD have run broadband to it any time in the last 10 years or they could do it now. You do not have to wait for someone to decide they want internet after moving in or waking up one day and deciiding they want internet.

Which means instead of launching 34,000 satellites over decades (+ more because you plan for them to constnatly burn up in the atmosphere on an extremely short time frame) you could simply not do that and instead connect people to broadband.

Kaelik wrote: ↑

Sat Apr 05, 2025 11:40 pm

In the extremely niche case of "a warzone" it may in fact be useful,

And that require the assumption you own the network (or the people who do support you), and the other side doesn't have anti-satellite capabilities, otherwise interesting things can happen. Conventional internet was intended to work even if bits of it were blown up by the Russians.

Stahlseele wrote: ↑

Sat Apr 05, 2025 11:55 pm

Are you sure you mean keppler syndrome and not Kessler Syndrome btw?

Those are basically synonyms.

Thaluikhain wrote: ↑

Sun Apr 06, 2025 1:24 am

And that require the assumption you own the network (or the people who do support you), and the other side doesn't have anti-satellite capabilities,

I know its not what the corporate empire or its loyalists want to hear. But this is why any satellite ISP, or even other satellite services should be required to remain neutral in conflicts, because as orbits fill up if you make any satellite in that orbit into a legitimate military target you have put the entire orbit at risk of the Kepler effect/Kessler Syndrome.

But proper enforced treaties to do with space technology to benefit the entire human race are just one of those nice things the USA won't let humanity have.

The reason was capitalism imperial supremacy. Now its just finding more things for Elon Musk to rub against drooling until they catch on fire and explode.