starlink and the disappearing night sky (podcast)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 พ.ค. 2024
- My final project for JRN450 : Building Stories and Soundscapes. Special thanks to Prof. Gaspar Bakos of Princeton University, Prof. David Valentine of the University of Minnesota, and Babak Tafreshi.
Cool video. Thanks! Just subscribed keep it up
thanks!
About 3 years ago i was walking the dog at 5 am. It was a clear sky full of stars. I saw a string of pearls all following each other across the sky. I thought we were being invaded by UFO's. Later that day i found out it was starlink. It was still a great experience.
Maybe the real UFOs were the friends we made along the way
Satellites are all over the skies already even without Starlink.
Additionally, Starlink won’t have the chains of satellites permanently. That is only visible shortly after launch as they move into their semi permanent orbits. They eventually spread out are much more sparse.
Light pollution is far much more of a concern from my perspective (an astrophotographers perspective). It obliterates the visibility of the very faintest objects for us astronomers, and reduced the true view of the stars. Some places in Europe have essentially no good spots for dark skies for hundreds of miles.
yep! The guests did address these issues, however as this was a class project with a limited length I wanted to focus on the newness/immediacy of LEO constellations, even though ground-based light pollution is much more visible of an issue. I do plan to follow up on that specific topic though in the future :)
I'm sorry to see dark night skies go away. They are beautiful. However the world needs Starlink. It is obvious that poorer nations will never have the infrastructure or investment to give their people access to quality information. Also their schools suffer horribly in what education they can bring. Starlink solves that problem. Starlink is trying to do better by blacking out their satellites to be more non-reflective. Over a few years the older brighter ones will be replaced with the darker ones.
Regardless, humanity itself is going to a different phase of existence. We are within a couple of more generations going to become a space fairing species. Times are changing and we all need to change with them. Bemoaning things won't stop human evolution.
I agree that times are changing which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I hope as we change that we do not lose sight of what it means to be human, rather than embrace a narrow definition imposed literally top-down from the interests of a few. Also, LEO constellations are likely not going to replace ground-based mobile broadband in “poorer nations” at least anytime soon, it still ain’t that cheap to launch rockets…