How 100,000 Satellites Will Change Earth Forever by 2040

this video is made possible by brilliant learn something new every day for 20 off by being one of the first 200 people to sign up at brilliant.org real life lore the 2020s will potentially become the most important decade in the history of human space travel and exploration so far virgin galactic is hoping to finally begin sending customers to space later this year or next nasa plans on returning humans to the moon just three years from now in 2024 with further missions going on throughout the decade while spacex ambitiously plans on launching their own manned mission to mars in 2026 but there's something else incredibly exciting taking place in space right now that's getting substantially less coverage than these big events are with launch costs plummeting to record lows and satellites becoming cheaper and cheaper to build tens of thousands of new satellites are set to occupy the earth's orbit in just the next 10 years alone we are at the forefront of the 21st century's brand new space race one that'll look completely different from the first one since this time around it's going to be more about owning and occupying earth's orbit rather than reaching for the moon or one-upping the soviet union you see while space may seem like a vast empty expanse it's totally the opposite of that immediately around earth where space begins for decades now humans have been busy blasting satellites up here and recently the numbers of new launches have hit hundreds every single year as a result space here has been getting pretty crowded with these things and that number is only slated to go higher and when a satellite gets old or breaks or just otherwise stops being useful there isn't any legal protocol for actually bringing them back down to earth they mostly just stay up there as huge piles of space garbage so if you counted up all of humanity's satellites both working and broken that are orbiting the earth today you'd get a number somewhere around 6 000 in total but if you were to look closer you would see that only about 2 800 of those are actually operational well the remaining 3 200 or so are the aforementioned giant piles of space garbage but to further break this down it makes some sense to look at all of these satellites and see what they're all actually doing up there in the first place i mean 6 000 satellites does seem like a lot so why do we even need that many to begin with well we already identified that about 3 200 of those satellites are basically worthless but the 2800 that are alive and well perform a lot of different functions about half of them are just plain old commercial satellites which perform everything from broadcasting television and internet to providing imagery services and mapping you use for directions next there are military satellites totaling about 350 worldwide which provide intelligence gathering navigation and secure military communications to some of the world's most powerful militaries including the united states russia and china although many more countries have smaller numbers of their own military satellites in orbit as well the next major category of satellites is the civil category there's 133 of these ones and they perform critical data capture for important events like weather and environmental readings finally the last major category includes combination satellites are basically ones that encompass more than one of these categories that are multifaceted these make up about a hundred of the active satellites today but while we're looking at satellite demographics from a functional perspective we can also look at it from the perspective of countries as well you see while the united states and the former soviet union now russia piloted the space race through the 20th century there are now many nations that occupy at least some permanent place in space but roughly 75 percent of the satellites in orbit today can still be attributed to just these five countries the united states with about 1300 china with 350 russia with 170 the united kingdom with 130 and japan with 80. there's a lot of satellites already up there in orbit but this has all just been setting up the tip of the iceberg of the coming satellite revolution between 2010 and 2020 humanity collectively launched about 2 500 satellites into orbit the 2020s on the other hand could see as many as 10 000 brand new satellites entering into earth's orbit more than three times the number of operational satellites that exist right now this is going to cause revolutionary changes in everyday life for all of us and most of the reasons it's going to be finally possible to do so is because of the incredible cost reductions across the entire space industry over the past few years 40 years ago back when the first nasa space shuttle launched it was substantially more expensive to haul mass into orbit for example in 1981 when the shuttle first began flying the cost to transport one kilogram of stuff into orbit was an astounding 85 5216 over time nasa did a great job of gaining greater efficiency with the space shuttle program but even by 1995 after 14 years of progress the cost was still at twenty six thousand eight hundred and eighty four dollars per kilogram it wasn't until almost a decade later after that in 2006 when the spacex falcon 1 first flew that we first ever saw a realistic launch cost of under ten thousand dollars a kilogram a decade later on from there in 2016 and the costs had been even further reduced to only 5 685 a kilogram by the atlas v rocket reduced even further just a few moments afterwards when the falcon 9 was introduced which saw launch costs drop even further to below 2 000 per kilogram for the first time which is about where we stand today in other words it's 42 times cheaper to send things into space today than it was just 40 years ago but reducing costs doesn't end at just 2 000 a kilogram nasa hopes to eventually get this down to under a thousand dollars by the year 2040. these drastic reductions in cost have opened up space and satellite launches to a much wider pool of people countries and corporations even zimbabwe one of the poorest countries in the world with an annual inflation rate currently over 700 percent has set aside funds to launch their own satellite by the end of the decade and while launch costs certainly have fallen a substantial amount it also helps that these savings can be combined with the extreme cost reductions in actually building satellites too you see in many ways the same revolution that transformed personal computing and placed a cell phone in nearly everyone's pocket is finally reaching satellites today while once upon a time a satellite may have been as huge as a full-sized garbage truck and cost upwards of 500 million dollars newer satellites today are often no larger than a single microwave and sometimes even a loaf of bread all the while costing as little as one million dollars and sometimes even less which has led to launch providers sometimes blasting off as many as 80 brand new satellites into orbit during a single launch all of these huge cost reductions have led us to one thing new incentives satellites are cheaper than ever to produce and launch and remain just as profitable actually they might end up being even more profitable companies like spacex oneweb and even amazon all have big ambitions this decade and beyond to create massive constellations of their own satellites that'll work together as a group to provide near full coverage of the entire planet's surface which will make incredible revolutionary changes to all of our lives you could get a good and stable internet connection phone call download and upload speeds literally anywhere you are on the planet regardless of how remote a place you think you're in this will be possible because unlike more traditional satellites these constellations will operate much closer to earth's surface here in an area known as low earth orbit or the area between 100 and 2000 kilometers above the earth's surface here the distance between the satellites and earth itself is relatively small keeping latency and overall communication speeds surprisingly fast and according to the united states federal communication commission there could be as many as a hundred thousand satellites orbiting the earth in just the next couple of decades this will for the first time in history open up the internet to the entire human species regardless of geographic location this revolution will no doubt bring across unprecedented technological change and unleash global communications on a level never before seen but it also comes with many challenges for one the astronomy community is already pretty on edge about the whole thing because even now with a relatively fewer number of satellites streaming by earth within low earth orbit they're pretty annoying you see most satellites reflect some amount of sunlight and thus they form small streaks across the night sky when zipping overhead that doesn't sound too bad but it's already completely ruining a lot of observatory imaging from ground-based observatories and more low-earth satellites will probably end up making this problem worse and worse to the point where eventually it might be extremely difficult or even impossible to take pictures or observe space in any meaningful way from the earth's surface obviously this would be a pretty fundamental change to our planet's existence and the entire astronomy profession will be negatively affected potentially forever but the problems and complexities don't just stop there today satellites are regulated at the national level meaning that each country has slightly different rules on what constitutes proper satellite usage while all countries generally are guided by the outer space treaty of 1967 large satellite constellations and even mega constellations of satellites from 21st century billionaires were simply just never thought of at the time and important rules for governance of these kinds of systems don't really exist right now today approximately 2 000 satellites occupy this area of space and with tens of thousands more planned over the next few decades this congested area is only going to become busier and busier what's more is that these smaller satellites will likely have shorter lifespans than traditional satellites of the past did and since it could still take up to 150 years for their orbits to naturally decay with a crash back into earth satellites that break or otherwise stop working will continue clogging up low earth orbit for centuries unless the companies countries and people who put them up there in the first place bring them back down if low earth orbit ever gets too crowded with defunct broken satellites it could lead to the infamous doomsday scenario that we call kessler syndrome a scenario where a collision of broken satellites cascades into a higher number of potential projectiles that further cascades into even further collisions that lead to even more projectiles and so on and so on until the entirety of low earth orbit is just one huge junkyard in its most catastrophic form kessler syndrome would effectively destroy all existing satellites make it impossible to launch any new satellites without them getting immediately destroyed and prevent all future human space exploration and travel for a century or more this would effectively render global scale internet satellite communications and gps technologies entirely defunct in order to prevent all of that from happening it's increasingly more important than ever that old satellites be de-orbited purposefully by the people who put them there through controlled reentry back to earth and laws mandating that countries and companies do so there is no doubt that the benefits of the coming satellite revolution will produce incredible economic and societal gains but while doing so we must also ensure that space remains safe and accessible for every future generation to come let's say that you want to learn more about how space and satellites work you could be interested in astrophysics or computer science or maybe you just want to brush up on the basics of math and logic or maybe you just want to learn more about how our world and how our universe works so what should you do well you're already watching educational videos here on youtube which is a great start but in order to really learn something you have to actually do it and that's where brilliant can come in to help brilliant is a website and app built off of this exact principle you learn best while doing and solving in real time you can jump directly into solving problems and be coached bit by bit until before you even realize it you've learned a new subject in stem you won't be asked to memorize long complicated formulas or endless facts you just pick a course you're interested in and get started and if you're feeling stuck or make a mistake you can simply read the explanations to find out more and learn at your own pace the best part about brilliant though is that there's something there for everybody whether you want to start at the basics of science math and computer science or dive straight into cutting-edge topics like astrophysics or neural networks i always struggled with learning complicated stem subjects while i was in school because it was easy for me to just get overwhelmed by a huge wall of information that was difficult to ever focus on but now brilliant has helped me so much with learning about all of these things that i used to think were just a lost cause and they helped me make videos like the one you just watched so if you'd like to join me and the community of 8 million learners and educators today you can start on anything from astrophysics to algebra 2 for 20 off by being one of the first 200 people who go to brilliant.org real life lore or by following the link down in the description and as always thank you so much for watching

Channel: RealLifeLore

Views: 762,329

Keywords: real life lore, real life lore maps, real life lore geography, real life maps, world map, world map is wrong, world map with countries, world map real size, map of the world, world geography, geography, geography (field of study), facts you didn’t know, satellites, spacex, starlink, starlink internet, satellite, future

Id: T3LR9-_fEdw

Length: 15min 18sec (918 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 11 2021