This is incredibly depressing, but also what if that’s bad for animals and bugs and stuff? Seems like it could cause serious problems all the way up the food chain.

If in a decade our biggest concern are taking care of biodiversity, I’m actually gonna be pretty happy

Taking care of biodiversity is already our biggest concern. If everything dies, so do we.

I meant more like, if the average human being has the capacity to actually care about biodiversity and the political power and will to do anything about it, and not like, fighting for survival in the water wars while dodging AI killbots

Maybe the ai killbots will find an interest in the bugs and biodiversity

LLM’s protecting bugs? I mean, they can be overly confident, sure…I had one suggest that I add %BasicallyAllUsers ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /bin/chmod * * to a sudoers dropin the other day.

A bit of a tautology.

“Now now, hold on, let’s see what the shareholders think about this.”

That is a nonsense statement. The vast majority of stars are already erased for the vast majority of humans. 57% live in cities, 80% live in urban areas. You’re lucky is you can see constellations in many cities, let alone the dimmer stars.

I’m not saying this isnt a problem, but this is possibly the worst framing of it that you can give.

The difference is, you can still go somewhere to see the stars. This guy is pointing out that you WON’T be able to do that because of satellites, where changing you’re own viewing area can’t effect that same change.

You seem to misunderstand the premise of this opinion article.

137% of humans live somewhere? Wow

Sorry your education didn’t work out so well for you.

By no means should we avoid the development of the space environment for human gain.

I don’t want to be a naysayer or Luddite (wait, who am I kidding?), but I hard disagree with that take. A space economy will get us nowhere. Yeah, sure, some interesting technology (arguably) came from the Apollo program, and NASA has done some amazing astronomy with JWST and Hubble. But, as with so many other aspects of modern life, the cost is far too great to society as a whole. The energy needed to get anything to or from orbit is enormous, and there is no way around that. The thing we need to curb climate change is reduction of energy usage in any form (driving, flying, electricity, ect.). This is even on top of other issues in rocketry like ozone layer depletion and the light pollution described above. As such, if climate change really is the greatest threat to humanity (which it is), putting anything into space is not a worthwhile venture.

Like any technology, doing it under capitalism is kinda the problem.

There’s no restraint being put up to do it in a way that’s actually FOR the people instead of for financial gain.

I think it can be worthwhile with lessened impact on the environment. Doing it the way we are with SpaceX launching a ton of cheap SATCOM satellites is BAD.

Yeah I mean, space is going nowhere. What’s the rush exactly? We know there’s nothing on Mars, so why should we destroy our own, beautiful planet to go there to “terraform” it?

If it was so fucking easy to terraform a barren wasteland, why can’t we just fix the Sahara desert or something first?

what the hell is this woke crap, everyone knows there’s just the one star, Tony Marcus tole me personally

I read an article not long ago that put it in really good perspective. In the not so distant future, when we look into the night sky, there will literally be a single natural star, among every 15 stars (or something like that). It was truly alarming.

Since the beginning of time, trillions of humans and other creatures have gazed at the night sky out of awe, romance, navigation, science, religion, or just sheer beauty, and now these Sociopathic Oligarch parasites are going to STEAL that core human experience from every future human, just so they can be a little richer, and abuse us a little harder.

I’m going to say that seeing satellites is also pretty fucking cool. We launched those things up to 14,000km/h or something and they are zooming round doing this sci-fi shit.

It’s something that we should be concerned about, but the light pollution meaning you can barely see any is the first place is as much to blame.

I wonder how many of these satellites are single-purpose and could be replaced with less satellites that do more things?

Also how many of them are just dead space garbage at this point that need to be removed from orbit? Maybe we should have a “one in/two out” policy or something. You wanna launch a new satellite into space, you gotta pay to remove two other objects first.

www.popsci.com/science/space-junk-around-earth/

The ones that are the issue need a lot of them to handle the bandwidth and they get deorbited all the time, polluting our upper atmosphere.

If we continue letting these stupid Americans do everything that comes to their stupid minds…

Elon musk isn’ta fucking American.

True, he was born in South Africa to a Canadian mother, so his original citizenships are to those countries. He does have an American citizenship since 2002, however.

Though I heard that the idea that immigrants aren’t actually American even if they do get citizenship is currently a rather controversial topic over there.

Someone should either deport or arrest and charge that motherfucker.