(FIXED)The vast majority of our stratosphere isn’t polluted by satellites - airborne communications stations will change that
Apart from space junk, satellites have massive carbon footprint.
https://astrodon.social/@jknodlseder/113028380162373253
Oh yeah, let’s build our infrastructure project based on tech that requires a large amount of helium. You know, that element that is extremely hard to store and transport. Yes, the one that’s already scarce and is required for vastly more important technologies.
I don’t see what the problem is, it’s not like helium production is a byproduct of an energy sector were trying to rapidly divest from…
They should just use hydrogen… you won’t even have to worry about recovering anything if there is an accident.
Just what Comcast needs, a fleet of very slow cruise missiles.
Can’t wait for them to park their buoyant IED router above my house if I don’t upgrade to the game day package.
Great for the 4th of July celebrations!
Problem is that a lot of that remaining third live in countries where the state will actively try to destroy the air craft to keep their people insulated from the wider global internet
Anyone else remember Google(Alphabet)'s “Project Loon?” It was just like this but it failed.
Read more: Wikipedia Loon website
And food, but let’s get Internet first to ask them if they’re hungry.
Well yeah but then they can order Uber eats. Solved world hunger right there for you.
The router crashed will become far more literal than it previously was.
Land cables are not that expensive.
Unless your population is incredibly sparse, land fiber or adsl cables are the way to go.
I live in a region which have 25 hab/km^2 which is one of the lowest in the world. And we have a massive cable implementation that covers more than 95% of the population.
The problem is money. And if you don’t have money for cable you don’t have money for XVIII century internet carrying blimps.
Land cables are not that expensive but they are in charge of the State, things like balloons or Starlink are the charge of the user and the company, the State doesn’t get the money but doesn’t need to build infrastructures
and the company
Surely the company would never be just as authoritarian as the state!
~ [cue anti-consumer subscription models and user policies]
If nothing else, at least companies can’t force you to pay for their services at gunpoint (yet).
They can use the state to do that for them
This has been a popsci fantasy for a quarter of a century or more. Google tried it and gave up.
Orrrrrrrr…hear me out…
We ALL just stop. We say no to these overinflated bundle prices, we say no to corporate censorship, we say no to the human trafficing. Elon musk will have paid 43 BILLION dollars for…nothing.
Many years ago my grandfather was involved in an air force test of aerial defense platforms that used balloons.
The idea was you could station these things all around the country and at the first sign of an attack you could have missiles launched from 10k feet to anywhere from anywhere.
The test encountered two problems that caused them to abandon the idea.
These balloons were incredibly easy to shoot down. Which would, presumably, rain volatile rocket fuel and munitions down on whatever was beneath them.
And if a missile launched, but failed to separate completely from it’s housing, it would carry that balloon on a wild, unpredictable trajectory, until it collided with something or it decided it had reached it’s detonation time.
Ideally, however, these would not be shot down.
That’s just it, they’re an easy target, and communications infrastructure is one of the first things you want to control or eliminate if you’re taking hostile territory.
Yes, and? I don’t believe these are replacing any existing infrastructure, but are for places that have no infrastructure for the internet. They could drastically improve things in those areas, and if those place became a warzone sometime in the future they’d probably be pretty fucked with or without proper land based infrastructure.
Ideally internet debates wouldn’t get THAT heated though.
Besides the cost of terminals, this problem has been solved by starlink and soon project kuiper.
I guess that’s fine but you also have to teach people how to use the internet.
If people are from a culture that typically doesn’t have internet access then they’re not really going to understand what they can do with it.
