I’d like you all to consider that places where you’d use starlink are also significantly more than 30x farther away from civilization than the average land-based internet user.
Definitely, that’s what we should do. But that will have a decent carbon footprint and more importantly our government (at least in the US) has utterly failed rural Americans (and more!) in terms of internet roll out.
That’s one of the problems with Internet access being provided by private corporations. They’re never going to service those people, because it’s not profitable to run a hundred miles of fiber for one guy in Wyoming, unless he’s crazy rich and pays for it himself. It’s the same issue the mail has, one of the many reasons the USPS is so important
Think of all the pollution that will be caused running new fiber cable to bumblefuck nowhere so 1 additional person or family can access the internet. It doesn’t make any more sense than Starlink, much less sense at that.
Fiber once it’s installed requires effectively no maintenance and it will last indefinitely until physically broken. Copper corrodes and wears out, but glass will last longer than the people who install it or the people who enjoy its use. Satellite internet from LEO requires many rocket launches per year to sustain, meanwhile fiber means rolling a truck (which is usually relatively local) anywhere a backhoe or flood or digging animal has broken it every few months or years, and these trucks are already rolling to install and maintain all of the existing services (or install new ones)
Actually it’s been working brilliantly, it’s just there’s so much of the United States to Unite with fiber that it’s taking time and continued investment. It used to be you couldn’t find fiber anywhere, now most of the farming communities I live around have at least some fiber services and it keeps growing every year. My in-laws just this month were notified they have the option to change from their 8/1mbit DSL to gigabit fiber, and they live in the boonies outside of a town of 500 nobodies ever heard of.
Seems we’re getting to where the next big hurdle is less rural fiber and more suburbs. I literally have significantly better internet options after moving to a small town of 10000 or so than my parents do in the suburbs of the capital city of the state.
Out in middle of nowhere Ohio, the only options are satellite and I’ll be damned if I’m doing to give Dish or Hughes net more money for worse speeds. Starlink is it until they actually run fiber out here.
Fact is, satellite internet from low earth orbit is the best solution in some parts of the world, and the ones to blame are literally the exact ISPs it’s competing with by providing service to the underserved. It’s a necessary option in providing the constant connectivity out society expects and relies upon (whether or not intermittent outages should be acceptable is a different discussion)
I would love to see some legislation requiring satellite ISPs to share infrastructure so we don’t have 3 incompatible competing services with duplicated but not necessarily redundant infrastructure. That would be a far more useful goal to push for
You know, I would think a progressive community would want to expand internet access to all (which is what Starlink does), so I’m kinda surprised there’s resistance every time it’s brought up.
You would think a progressive community would look at ALL the factors of such an endeavor and analyze them in a real world setting taking into account all the various variables.
Instead of focusing on ONE positive and acting as if all the negatives are automatically outweighed by that one positive.
First, you really need to look at the definition of progressive, because its for sure not: “being in favour of bringing tech to more people people even if it has disastrous consequences for everyone else”. Second, there are other people doing way better job at expanding internet access to everyone, for example in spain: conectate35.es where they have internet for 35 euros a month, in any part of the territory with 100mbps download speed without needing to clog the space with new satellites for Elon’s personal reasons, without needing to be constantly building new rockets, without making the pockets of Elon even larger. That is something that is actually bringing internet to actual people that needs it at a reasonable price, with the state paying for the equipment and installation in most cases. Obviously could be even better, but its actually helping real people.
Are you even serious? Maybe try looking at a map of spain, there are plenty of rural areas that are loosing population and leaving old towns completely deserted because they lack internet connection and are hours away from any relevant city and shops, you can read about the empty Spain theguardian.com/…/empty-spain-government-urged-to… with a simple search instead of trying to talk about stuff you dont even know, also btw, conectate 35 is the same concept as starlink, which is satellite driven internet for rural areas, but its way cheaper, sustainable and isnt managed by a piece of shit. …guim.co.uk/…/Spanish-population-change-inArticle…
for example in spain: conectate35.es where they have internet for 35 euros a month, in any part of the territory with 100mbps download speed
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map of spain, there are plenty of rural areas that are loosing population and leaving old towns completely deserted because they lack internet connection
Pick one or the other, you’re literally arguing both sides of the fence here.
Is it really hard to read and understand that the government is launching this kind of operations with small internet providers and hispasat so people stop having to leave the rural side of spain from lacking access to internet?
I’m actually surprised internet takes 3% the amount of energy it takes to get to space just to run some internet wires. I’d have thought it would be much much lower than that.
But also, starlink completes with geostationary satellite and home cellular connection more than internet over wires. Or even people who didn’t have an option before.
Did your intuition consider the energy required to dig a trench to bury the cale in? Or putting up posts to lift the cable off the ground? I didn’t consider it at first, but neither is done with climate neutral machinery.
The operational requirements are probably pretty similar, the satellites are obviously exclusively solar powered, so no contribution there.
Yeah I did, but cities where most of the internet users are have very short runs, and the cabling is usually installed with the building. Also, I think I’ve usually seen internet run with the telephone wires in rural areas rather than in trenches.
Spoiler: It’s 0.1 tonnes of CO2e per subscriber per year. This is not mentioned in the article.
This includes for example the emissions generated in the course of constructing the rockets that launch the satellites. So far it’s unclear to me whether, when comparing to terrestrial telecom, they include e.g. the emissions produced when manufacturing the trucks that deploy the infrastructure.
This also means the amount of emissions per user will go down the more users they get. It’s not very fair to compare something new to something that’s been around for decades in something that is based solely on the amount of users they have. I hate starlink, but this report is trash.
Emissions are going to go down when starship is made as well.
Starship uses a methane + oxygen fuel which burns cleaner, and can be produced with just water and CO2 making it carbon neutral.
I don't think every flight will be neutral immediately, or what % will be consistently once its scaled up, but it'll be better.
But 1 carbon neutral flight sending up hundreds of satellites will bring it down quickly. They could even save the carbon neutral flights for themselves for PR purposes.
You can’t produce methane from CO2 for free. It requires extremely high pressures and then you have to add in as much as energy as you would get out of burning the methane to make methane from scratch.
SpaceX’s launch facility, where they’d likely try this stupid process, is in Texas. Texas gets most of its electricity from burning fossil fuels. So unless spaceX makes a private nuclear reactor on site to power the methane manufacturing plant, they’ll be burning fossil fuels to make electricity so they can turn C02 back into a fossil fuel. That’s not carbon neutral
But don't get me started on how there no such thing as carbon neutral because it took carbon to build the solar panels, or wind mills, and the person operating the facility had to eat vegetables which required someone to ship them, which required a EV which required power that came from solar but those solar panels which were made from panels produced via solar panels required someone else to clean them which produced co2 making their meals too!
The launch facility they have in Boca Chica is surrounded by wildlife preserves, where are they going to put a solar farm big enough for a usable methane plant?
To put it in perspective, a square meter of solar panel puts out about 200 watts.
At atmospheric pressure, a cubic meter of methane gas contains about 40 million joules of energy.
40 million/200 = 200,000 square meters of solar panels needed to produce a cubic meter of methane.
And that’s assuming the process is 100% efficient. It’s also not counting the energy needed for the pumps to pressurize plant, or the methods they would use to extract or move the carbon dioxide, or cool down the methane.
That 40million joule figure is for gaseous methane, starship needs liquid methane to run, so the methane would need to be cooled with industrial refrigeration to turn it into fuel, which adds even more energy to the equation.
For the amount of fuel Starship needs, the Sabatier process is not feasible if you’re doing it with solar panels and planning on launching more than once a year or so. Not unless they want to pave over a small city with solar panels.
Putting energy back into CO2 to get fuel is not really economically feasible. It’s a useful process for mars for example, because you can drop off the plant and have it trickle fuel into a launch vehicle while you build the base and wait for the crew to arrive.
Boca Chica isn't going to be the main launch center in the future due to things like the wildlife preserve around it. They're going to be restricted at some point. It's a R&D center.
They could also build the solar/wind elsewhere to offset anything, or maybe they could even invest in a SMR. They'll have the cash once those start coming online.
I wouldn't be surprised if they're investing money to optimize the process as well, just like we see new advances in desalination continually making it more efficient. (Edit: e.g https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.35848/1347-4065/ace831)
Also even in Texas, it isn't going to be coal forever, more and more renewable sources are being added to the grid every year. I'm not trying to say this will be an immediate thing.
They almost certainly do not. Embodied energy is conveniently ignored 99% of the time because a) awareness of how much carbon goes into everything could result in consumers consuming less — couldn’t possibly do the almighty economy dirty like that — and b) it’s extremely difficult to calculate with any reasonable degree of accuracy.
Thank you, I was wondering how high the emissions could possibly be for Internet access from the customer’s perspective. I figured simply owning a car probably smashed even “30x as much” as other ISPs
It looks like the study they linked only addresses the CO2 produced by the satellites, and not the land based providers.
Another interesting thing is that OneWeb and Kuiper (competing satellite internet services) are estimated to have significantly more per-user emissions than Starlink (40-200% more emissions!) (keep in mind that Starlink is predicted to have the most users) while also being estimated to provide a worse service and be more expensive per user. (all taken from the charts on page 6)
They also mention that Starship will likely lower carbon emissions of later Starlink launches significantly.
I’m not quite sure how the much larger Starlink V2 design factors in to all of this, or if they even took it into account.
Elon Musk is a total fool and an idiot, but like others said, this article is hogwash. The satellites do not pose a risk for Kessler Syndrome due to their LEO. They will fall to earth and burn up. They also maneuver to avoid collisions. It is highly unlikely to contribute anything at all to Kessler Syndrome.
Additionally, how are they comparing carbon footprint? Article is behind paywall. The internet infrastructure on earth didn’t pop into existence out of thin air, carbon neutral. The trucks and ships used to lay wire, the mining and manufacturing of everything involved in the process, creates carbon for both. The carbon that would be created to provide access to rural areas as an alternative. If you are going to count the carbon to make and fuel spaceships, you must also count the carbon to make the ships that lay and maintain undersea cables and trucks that maintain cable on land. The SpaceX ships are largely reusable as well, so the carbon to make the ships also needs to be split among its voyages to space just as a ship at sea makes multiple trips.
Even if they’re in low earth orbit an impact could spread pieces into higher orbit due to the energies involved. That could in turn impact other satellites at a higher orbit and just keep going.
Quantum mechanics also says that all the air in my lungs could collapse to a single point, but on the grand scale, these things don’t happen. Risk analysis requires evaluation of probabilities.
It is very improbable that there will be a collision caused by a starlink satellite. While Musk is certainly an idiot who can’t be trusted, there are intelligent people who work for SpaceX who have considered all this and more before launching their satellites.
They just don’t care. If they could earn a trillion knowing that the gain would destroy the planet in 10 years, they would. They’re out of control, and the states on their knees to beg their money.
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