Starlink Is Not Alone - And It Could Lead To Catastrophe | Answers With Joe

you know sometimes i think we're a little too hard on ourselves yes the world is garbage right now fascism is on the rise we can't agree on anything clearly we are not very good at this whole internet species thing but really why would we be this level of connectivity that we're all living in right now this has never been experienced in the entire 200 000 year history of our species i mean up until just a couple hundred years ago the most anybody ever travel was maybe one town over because the only way to get around was on a horse and most people didn't even have that things had always been this way they had never not been this way most people didn't even know how to read because everything they needed to know could be learned from the hundred or so people that they knew in the village around them and every technological leap in access to information has been followed by a period of social and political turmoil i mean look at the printing press it was invented in 1440 and a few decades later the christian church split into protestants and catholics and they've been fighting about it ever since and of course today we have these things in our pockets with the compendium of all human knowledge in it and the ability to connect with literally anybody on the planet at the top of a finger and this is literally like 15 years old and the internet the power is it is what 30 years old i mean of course we're going to be really bad at this true story i've been skiing once in my entire life and it was a nightmare i was falling over left and right i literally couldn't go 10 feet without beefing it it was super embarrassing but the worst part of all was that for some reason i thought i would be good at this i'd seen skiing on tv and in the movies it looked like a lot of fun and you know i played sports i had good reaction times what not i wrote a skateboard back in the day i got this man it turns out that sliding down a mountain cover with snow when you've lived your entire life in the flattest place on earth which almost never gets any snow is terrifying it's like i was driving through san francisco on black eyes and ball tires and i kind of melted down at the whole thing actually because i had this expectation ridiculous expectation in hindsight that i should be good at this and yeah i feel like that's how the whole world is with the whole internet situation right now you know we're really beating ourselves up for how badly we're bungling this i've done plenty of it myself but we are literally learning how to share the planet with a digital super organism one that we created so maybe the expectation that we should be good at this is as ridiculous as me thinking that i could ski and yet we continued to lean into it because that's what we've always done and despite the initial disruptions to the fabric of society over the long run our quality of life has gone up because of it and soon if spacex has their way the entire planet will be covered with fast cheap satellite internet that's the starlink project that we all know about but spacex isn't the only company working on a satellite internet swarm there are several in the works actually so let's take a look at why this is such an attractive idea to these companies which ones are likely to succeed and what this means for the world as we know it [Music] so everyone's pumped for satellite internet with starlink but here's the thing satellite internet's been around for a while in fact telstar won the first communications satellite from the us launched in 1962 just four years after explorer one which i talked about in my video last month about the van allen belts it was designed at bell labs for at t and it was the first satellite that beamed live tv to the us and europe it also carried the first satellite phone call and it made the first satellite data transmission between two computers in 1962 so technically there was satellite internet before there was internet unfortunately telstar 1 was functional for less than a year and the reason for that can also be found in my video about the van allen belts i was talking about a nuclear test called starfish prime that was aimed at the van allen belts and talked about it right here they were testing to see if they could use the belts to create sort of a radiation shield to prevent missile attacks on ground-based locations below it didn't work but the emp from the blast did manage to knock out one-third of the satellites that were currently in orbit yeah this was one of those satellites 18 months later a satellite named cincom3 became the first to launch in the geostationary orbit it provided live coverage of the tokyo olympic games and this was a big deal because geostationary orbit means that the satellite is in the same position over earth at all times and it does this because it's far enough away from the planet that its orbital speed matches the speed of the earth's rotation it's really far away like 35 786 kilometers far away but it does allow you to send and receive messages 24 7. whereas a satellite in low earth orbit would be whizzing by overhead and could only send and receive signals and short windows plus you can cover a massive area from geostationary orbit in fact it only takes three satellites to cover the whole planet so yeah the communications industry has been using geostationary orbit ever since just kind of increasing the power of the satellites over the years to accommodate for the increased traffic just a quick side story here when i was growing up my grandparents had a ranch way out in the middle of nowhere and they didn't have access to any cable so they had to use satellite tv but this was way before like the direct tv dishes you see you know mounted on the side of people's houses no that they had a giant satellite dish was like eight feet wide and it was like out in the middle of a field like i could have recreated the poster over to contact with this thing i'm not even kidding and it was nuts because every time you change the channel you could look out there and see it turning and finding another satellite that was a lot of work just to watch tails from the crypt i got to say so yeah these satellites provided live events and phone calls and movies young boys probably shouldn't be watching but as the internet became a thing that was on there too in 1996 hughes network systems launched the first satellite internet service called direct pc i mentioned directv a second ago well that was hughes network systems they they created directv in 1994. that stream tv direct pc aired internet huge network systems by the way they were a real pioneer in early satellite communication that cincom3 satellite that i talked about a second ago the one that went to geostationary orbit that was them or it actually was their parent company hughes aircraft company and if that name sounds familiar that's because it was founded by howard hughes yes the howard hughes who leonardo dicaprio played the aviator the guy from the rocketeer the spruce goose guy you didn't think this was going to go all the way back to howard hughes did you anyway direct pc launched a mixed reviews but it was still faster than dial-up internet those days but as terrestrial and dsl internet and cable started coming online satellite started to fall behind for two main reasons the first is that satellite systems are just really expensive to upgrade case in point hues net which is what hues network systems goes by now they have satellites capable of over 100 megabits per second download speed but they only advertise up to 25 megabits per second that's because they don't have enough satellites to give each customer full speed so they have to kind of restrict how much each customer can get they do hope to fix this with a launch this year but this satellite cost the company 400 million dollars that doesn't even count launch costs another company called viasat is launching two satellites this year for the same reason and uh yeah they're expecting to pay between 1.2 and 1.4 billion dollars for the two of them that is a lot of money for these companies to invest and keep in mind that'll only get their customers up to 100 megabits per second which is way better yes but it doesn't really blow your hair back when you compare it to like gigabit fiber services so the expense of it all is the first problem the second problem is latency and this is just not something that's ever going to be able to get fixed from geostationary orbit not without breaking the laws of physics latency refers to how long it takes a user to make a request from an internet provider's network and get a response you can think of it as a time between clicking a link in the page opening and yeah when the nearest node to a provider's network is 35 786 kilometers above your head getting a response is just it's going to take some time like one way of looking at this is that if you want to send a message by a geo satellite to somebody just a mile away the distance it has to travel to get to that satellite and back is basically the same distance as if that signal had to travel all the way around the world just to go one mile over the absolute minimum latency for a geo round trip is about 240 milliseconds now hughes net and bias ad are averaging around 600 milliseconds in more real life terms that's like just over half a second now in comparison terrestrial internet can go as low as 10 milliseconds in practice anything under 100 is considered fine for everything except gaming so half a second may not sound like a big deal but satellite internet customer has been complaining about the latency problem since the early days of huesnet it's just clunkier and especially as more work has gone online more communication has gone online this starts to matter more and more and by the way there are some financial applications where it can actually be a detriment and yeah the only way to fix this problem is to bring those satellites closer to the earth but if you're going to do it from lao you're going to need a lot of satellites where geo satellites can hit one third of the planet from 36 000 kilometers up something from lower than 2000 kilometers and leo can only hit a small area plus there's the fact that in order to stay in orbit and leo that small area is moving across the surface of the earth at 25 000 kilometers an hour so the only way to cover the entire circumference of the earth is to have a bunch of satellites that can relay back and forth with each other basically passing the signal from one spot on the ground to another like a game of hot potato this drastically reduces the distance a signal has a travel but again it takes a lot of satellites to do this especially considering the earth is a sphere now in the interest of over communication there are some orbits between geo and leo like the molnia orbits and the tundra orbits that can provide full coverage with just a handful of satellites now these are mostly used for gps services though but the idea of an leo constellation of satellites to provide internet service goes all the way back to the 90s teledesic was formed in 1994 backed by bill gates and they plan to build a constellation of 840 satellites this later got scaled back to 288 and then to none the company folded in 2002. several other companies have tried this as well and they've all failed the cost of launching that many satellites is just too much the idea is solid everybody tends to agree that it would work and probably be better than geostationary satellites if anybody could afford to get them all up there which brings us to starlink spacex with their reusable rockets have brought the cost of launches down to the point that this crazy idea is actually kind of possible especially given the fact that the satellite technology has gotten smaller than ever before with cubesats becoming popular so you could launch hundreds of them at a time so yeah i mean if you're spacex it's kind of a no-brainer assuming it's that much better than traditional satellite internet right now starlink has around 2 000 starlink satellites at 550 to 570 kilometers up and over 145 000 customers so far and according to ookla they're averaging at around 97.23 megabits per second download speeds for context huesnet's geostationary satellites are averaging 19.3 megabits per second as for latency a camper on pike's peak recently recorded between 34 and 36 milliseconds but he was on a mountain so now spacex is promising that speeds will eventually reach 300 megabits per second but as more customers use it it's actually starting to get a little slower uh but considering they still have like 40 000 satellites to go it it looks promising no wonder viasat tried to get their fcc license revoked yeah last year they were part of a group of people that that sued saying that starlink launches were going to be bad for the environment no conflict of interest there or anything actually it it gets funnier because those two super expensive satellites i was talking about earlier that they're scheduled to launch they're going up on a falcon heavy conflict of interest maybe but uh are they wrong i mean 42 000 satellites is a lot of satellites it's actually eight times more satellites than the number of satellites that were already in orbit when they first started launching starlink in may 2019. now the reason for so many is because they want to create multiple shells of coverage with constellations at different altitudes current plans call for five shells all with 20 vertical miles between them okay so now might be the time to talk about the elephant in the room [Music] from almost the very first starlink launch concern has been floating around about what the effect the starlink would have on ground-based astronomy especially some of the earliest prototypes they actually reflected a lot of sunlight and i had a lot of people worried about like what this was going to look like with the sky full of them they have made progress since then to use less reflective coatings on there and put little visors on it to reduce the glare but it's not perfect and honestly i never knew how to feel about this because anytime you deal with something elon musk related there's there's so it's so polarizing there's so many different things flying around about it it can be kind of hard to distinguish the signal from the noise like i know these bigger telescopes have powerful algorithms to account for different atmospheric disturbances i just assumed that they would have something like that for satellites as well i mean satellites have been up there for a long time you know so how much of a problem is this really well i decided to ask somebody who knows far more about this than i do so recently i had a talk with dr becky smithhurst uh she came on my podcast where we spent most of the time talking about the james webb space telescope but while she was there i made sure to ask her about the starlink problem and here's what she had to say i mean if like all these companies were willing to share all of their like positional data telemetry that kind of stuff with like make it public we could have algorithms running in the background that could like send up an alert like oh a satellite is about to pass over your observation now pause for a minute while it goes and then carry on which would be great now if you're looking at what's called an extended source like i do galaxies right they're extended over a quite a large patch of the sky you might be able to say okay i lost this section of the galaxy and i'll just get rid of that in that one i'll add it together but if you're looking at something that's much more concentrated like a star or say you're even looking at the tiny bit of light from the star that's passed through the atmosphere of the exoplanet that's orbiting around it so that we can look to see what's in that atmosphere that'll be completely lost like you would it would completely glare out that entire thing if it passed over so it's not something correct for but it's something we can avoid if that data is shared with us um there is still an issue to astronomy and especially also to radio astronomy because obviously satellites do use light to communicate with the ground it's just not visible lights usually radio waves because they're not impeded by clouds or anything like that and so if you can imagine a satellite going over a telescope that's designed to be super sensitive like you just get this huge spike of noise that completely drowns out whatever you're actually trying to detect they also have huge fields of view as well they don't just concentrate down like optical telescopes do they tend to look like you know a big patch of sky at once and so limit like limiting the interference from satellites going over this big patch of sky at once is it is a huge deal especially when their lower earth satellites like these big constellations will be so it's a huge huge issue and i don't think it's one that's going to be solved overnight i think optical astronomy probably can mitigate for it with if it if the data is shared and if we can do these algorithms but i think radio astronomy will struggle even more interesting people like oh well who has about radio astronomy but it's like there's so much we study with radio astronomy like fast radio bursts at the minute the big one you know we still don't know really know what they are um you've then got all the all the cool high energy stuff right it's like quasars and pulsars and like flickering uh agn as well that's all radio waves and so there's a lot we need radio telescopes for and to understand as well so it's not just something that you can necessarily dismiss so it's not an insurmountable problem but it is a problem and while it might feel satisfying to point fingers at spacex and elon the fact of the matter is it might just be an inevitable problem because people have been wanting to do this for a long time since before spacex even existed and there are multiple companies working on something like this right now so let's take a look at some of them first up is project kuiper from amazon project kuiper was first announced in april 2019 with the goal of launching 3236 satellites to an orbit of between 590 and 530 kilometers so slightly higher than starlink but they will be using more robust satellites that can support up to megabits per second download speed which would be faster than starlink so far amazon has spent more than 10 billion dollars on project kuiper and there have been some bumps along the way but they plan on launching two prototype satellites in the fourth quarter of this year so as for who's actually going to launch these rockets right now they're using ula's atlas 5 and abl space systems rs1 rocket but i mean you know once blue origin gets new glenn off the ground they're going to be using that at this rate sometime in 2040. regardless of what they launch on though their license with the fcc requires them to put at least half the constellation out by 2026 so we can expect to hear a lot more about this in the next few years another company working on a satellite constellation is one web one web is based out of the uk and at one point they were planning on launching a constellation of nearly 50 000 satellites then they went through some funding issues reportedly because of the pandemic and this led to a bankruptcy but once they came out of the bankruptcy their plan slimmed down to about 6372 satellites of which so far they've launched 394. they're in a much higher orbit than star linking kuiper at 1200 kilometers but so far they seem to be doing pretty well a test in 2019 showed download speeds of 400 megabits per second with a 32 millisecond latency now a more recent test in 2021 got 165 megabits per second and 45 milliseconds latency so it's it's clearly fluctuating but it's competitive now one thing that differentiates oneweb from starlink and kuipers they're targeting commercial uses instead of residential customers hughes network systems which i mentioned before is an investor in oneweb and according to the press release they're targeting quote enterprise government commercial aviation and maritime cellular back haul and community wi-fi hot spots man hughes really wants to do this constellation internet thing i guess they're convinced that it's way the future and one more quick thing because they're targeting commercial customers they can charge more for their terminals so their terminals are going to go between a thousand and fifteen hundred dollars as opposed to star links terminals which only go for 500. it should be noted though that spacex is actually selling their starlink terminals for a loss right now they apparently cost thirteen hundred dollars to produce but they're kind of making that gamble to get early adopters on board and last but not least we come to the canadian company telesat telesat's been a satellite communications company since 1969 and they were founded as a crown owned company meaning the government of canada holds a significant interest a deal in 2021 injected 1.44 billion canadian dollars into the company canadian dollars are just like american dollars except they're all stuck together from maple syrup and most of that investment was there to fund telesat's light speed internet constellation much like others on this list they've changed the proposed size of their constellation multiple times in 2016 they announced plans for 117 satellites this was later raised 209 then 298 which is where it currently stands but they applied to launch a total of 1 671 satellites just to ensure that they can meet future demand 78 were slated to go out this year in 2022 but dates were slipped to 2023 and the reason for that is because they're supposed to go up in the new glen but that's okay they may actually need the extra time they're running a little bit behind on getting the satellites built right now because of all the global supply chain issues like one web light speed satellites will orbit at higher altitude around a thousand kilometers and they're expected to have latencies in the 30 to 50 millisecond range also like oneweb telesat plans to target businesses and governments as well as existing satellite customers like airlines and cruise ships but here's the twist one of the conditions of the government funding is that they also have to provide services to indigenous communities which they would actually do a better job of because they're going to be flying in a hybrid orbit that sweeps over the poles so they'll cover areas that starlink won't so if we look at all these together on a chart you can see that starlink is way ahead of everybody else in terms of getting them up there and getting the service started but they are not specifically going to be the fastest one kuiper looks like it might be a little bit faster and then the commercial services operations here one web is already in the lead they've got some up there lightspeed hasn't put any up just yet but let's just be honest right now if they don't have any satellites up it's all just in the proposal stage so starlink is definitely in the lead so that's what we can expect in the coming years but before we wrap this up there is one more concern that a lot of people have with these satellite swarms that is worth talking about we already talked about the astronomy problem but there is also the problem of what happens when there's this much stuff in space you know i've talked in here before about the possibility of the kessler syndrome which is when collisions in space create space debris which creates more collisions and on and on until the planet's just trapped inside a shell of metal debris circling the earth 15 times faster than a bullet and they will basically shred anything that tries to pass through it that's fun not only would it trap us here on earth but it would remove our ability to use satellites at all which would be a massive setback for our species there's just a lot that we totally take for granted in our lives right now that are only made possible because of all these satellites circling overhead and obviously doubling or quadrupling or octupling the number of these satellites in orbit only increases the potential for something like that to happen so is this a bad idea it's something to be concerned about for sure but one could make the argument that these low-earth orbit swarms might actually be safer in the long run than launching stuff up to geostationary orbits because satellites in low earth orbit actually decay really quickly there's actually tiny amounts of atmosphere going up hundreds of miles that creates just a minute drag force and leo satellites and over time it slows them down enough that they do eventually re-enter and burn up in the atmosphere satellites in the general orbit of starlink might come down in a few years maybe even less than a year whereas satellites in geostationary orbit are essentially there forever like thousands of years and for that there is a company worth mentioning and that's privateer space just launched last year and backed by apple co-founder steve wozniak privateer space aims to be focused on quote space environmentalism their plan is to monetize the removal and recycling of space junk how exactly they plan to do this has not really been announced but uh if you want to know more about it their chief scientific advisor marie baja talked about it on star talk i'll put a link down below it's probably way too soon to tell whether or not their plan is the ultimate fix for space but it'll be interesting to see how that comes along so what's the verdict on the satellite internet swarms i'll be the first to admit i am not the most bullish person in the world on starlink i never have been personally i don't i don't think it's really a replacement for terrestrial internet and like i said before satellite internet's been around for a really long time like is it really worth clouding our skies for a split second less latency it just always seemed like more of a niche application to me but that's really easy for me to say living in the middle of a city with gigabit internet service you know if i lived out in the middle of nowhere or was it an underserved indigenous community you know something like this might be a godsend having access to cheap fast internet anywhere in the world is probably a good thing and with the workforce becoming more mobile these days which has been completely accelerated by kovid yeah i mean something like this might be a game changer like i've become kind of fascinated by the whole van life movement lately and the fact that you can just kind of live and work effortlessly anywhere you want you know i have friends that are living like that and they send pictures of their office that day and it's always like it's like they're working in a postcard or something it's crazy but i'm interested to hear what you think is this a service you could get some use out of are you a starlink beta tester and if so what's your experience been with it or do you think it's just a dangerously ill-conceived idea that's going to ruin astronomy and clutter up the skies discuss ultimately i think the best argument for it is that it makes it easier for more people around the world to participate in the information age and you can make things easier on yourself financially with today's sponsor wealthfront alright so long time viewers this channel know that i do not recommend anything that i don't use myself and wealthfront is no exception so i'm getting up in the years which sucks for a lot of reasons but one of the good things about getting older is i'm finally at a place where i can start thinking about investing but here's a problem with that i don't like thinking about investing i know some 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 140,977

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: 0IRDmNer7_I

Length: 26min 33sec (1593 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 07 2022