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[Music]
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hello hello welcome back to another episode of the waveform podcast we're your hosts i'm marquez and i'm andrew
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and today we've got david and mel with us as well for another special deep dive episode i'm gonna say uh keep your
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optimism hats on for this one but also there's a lot of nerdy stuff and a lot of space talk take it away david all
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right so you guys heard of the space race of
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the 1960s well we're in 2021 and today on the show we've got a new space race
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for you a space race that you haven't probably thought about before stick with us
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nasa's space shuttle program was a shining new phase in america's journey to the star kind of a curious mix of
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science business and self-aggrandizement for a very small billionaire class in part because as i said this is the first time
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that we're going to see a launch from american soil in almost 10 years time five four
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three two one zero ignition lift off so i'm about to bring you guys
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into a deep rabbit hole of exploration mind blowingness and uh space stuff as
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we all you know we all like space stuff i just want to say space is like probably my favorite category i don't get to talk
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about yeah anytime we do space trivia i'm all over it yeah anytime we get to talk about space in any way all of my
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like fourth fifth sixth grade like reading way too much about space comes up so i'm excited this will be
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interesting because there's a lot of space trivia in this let's see it all right i'm ready okay all right well
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first question i got for you guys uh do you know what satellite internet is
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just on a basic level yeah how does that work um well as far as i can tell there's a bunch of satellites in space
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and there's a bunch of data centers on earth and when people request information from
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the internet it pings one of the satellites that's sort of geolocked over them right and
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then it goes down to a data center and then it goes up the sidelight goes back to the person like that assuming similar to like
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satellite television yeah uh data transfer through wireless waves pinging off of satellites but
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that's like the total basis of my knowledge on that right right okay well so as of as of 2018 um
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how many people would you say didn't have access to internet in the us
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and globally didn't have access to the and we're saying like access in their homes right
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like general action yeah it doesn't count a go to starbucks or something like that
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yeah right most people have yeah most people have access to internet you said 2018 yeah i would i would be estimating
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90 of the us has access to the internet i guess 80 has access
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okay so as a 2018 about 14 million people in the us didn't have internet access at all okay and 25 million people
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didn't have broadband access or faster so that's like like internet you need to do video calls you
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know there's we've got a pandemic going on the stuff you need to do school with you know that's like a
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pretty sizable percentage i mean just because you have broadband internet doesn't mean it's great internet right either there's
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some difference between like having speed and consistency as well right it's about four percent yeah okay so that's
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just the u.s though yeah um think about how much of the world
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is online yeah so it's a much bigger difference around the world there's lots of areas that are coming online now which is
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really exciting um but yeah it's definitely probably like
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60 percent of the world 70 of the world has internet access but it's it's not as good as certain
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individual countries right you have a guess andrew you know i was very off for the us so i
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feel like uh 70 75 has access okay worldwide yeah you guys
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you guys are close marcus got it perfectly right actually immediately uh about 40 of the planet isn't online yet
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okay that's a lot of people yeah 40 of the entire planet uh more than three billion people still don't have access
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to internet three billion it's a lot of people right um and at this point like in 2021 the
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internet's like become this essential utility for everything that we do like you think
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about youtube you can learn anything you can learn any skill you don't really need to go to college anymore you can
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kind of learn whatever trade you want you know um and even if you go into a store and
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you want to apply for a job most of them will say like oh apply online apply online right you know it's
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it's ridiculous it's crazy i was thinking about sorry i'm interrupting but the beginning of this pandemic where
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i was like all right the whole world around us is changing but what if you just like emerged from your house with no internet how long would it take you
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to find other context clues to alert you about what's happening right and there was like road signs that said like
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things about covey and there was like people started wearing masks more in the airport but unless you looked it up
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it would be hard to know it's kind of like um it reminds me of this story about war of the worlds there's this
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thing that happened in new jersey affiliated stations present orson welles and the mercury theater on the air in
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the war of the world by h.g west where they were playing the war of the world's radio show in new jersey but they had
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like a public service announcement that was going over that was like taking over the broadcast
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so it skipped the whole part of the public service announcement where it said by the way what you're about to hear is not real yeah and they played
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their all the worlds and there was a total public freak yeah everyone was everyone actually thought aliens were
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invading so it's crazy it's like everyone goes online now they say like oh my gosh was that an earthquake you know every little thing we instantly
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have access to this internet so wouldn't you agree that satellite internet the idea that these satellites
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can you know orbit the planet they can kind of reach everywhere right there's 40 of the earth that's not online
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and because satellites can orbit the earth if you get enough of them you can kind of get internet anywhere you on the
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planet do you agree that that's a pretty good thing overall seems like a good idea
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the way you're asking that's like a shooter's life seems like how a podcast would start
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am i baiting you let's see i mean yeah in terms of infrastructure and everything that obviously would make the most sense because you're not actually
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establishing an in the ground infrastructure yeah in hard to reach places right and the world's been changing people are working from home
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there's nomadic and creative economy lifestyles and like if people can kind of just have the internet they can kind
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of work from anywhere so it seems great um have you heard of starlink before yes
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yeah yeah i heard that sort of floated around i think i know a couple of people on twitter yeah whoever who have
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starlink internet give a quick explanation of what you believe it to be um starlink is an elon musk company
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and uh they're putting a bunch of satellites in orbit and giving people
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starlink internet essentially and i don't know if it's any better than regular internet other than just being
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accessible in more places but yeah that's about all i know yeah so so the
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older satellite internet satellite internet surprisingly has been around for a very long time yeah i uh showed you guys where i grew up yesterday the
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middle of absolute nowhere smartville california and we had what was called hughes net at the
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time and that was way back in like the early 2000s right houston that's been around since like 1996. satellite
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internet's been like a an idea for a while um but those satellites there were
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very few of them and they were in what's called geosynchronous orbit which means that as the earth rotates the satellite
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is at a position uh in orbit where it's rotating with the earth right right so like that's good and bad it's good
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because as long as you have a clear view of the sky you can consistently get
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internet right but when something is further away there is
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this law called the inverse square law and it kind of relates to both like light and data transmission and all that
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stuff basically the further something is away to an nth degree weaker the signal is so
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if you're in geosynchronous orbit it's higher up in orbit which means it stays with the earth but the speeds you're
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getting are not that great right you're like getting pretty slow like it's not even dsl um and they have over the years like
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companies like usenet have been able to like get faster speeds but they're still not that fast like they're still slower
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than most data connections so starlink is kind of this
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new company that like you said was launched by elon musk that is trying to make satellite internet much more
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readily available and it's supposed to be much much faster he wants it to be able to be like you
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can game on it which means like you they want latency that's like 1ms like 10ms is like what
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they're aiming for right now with the latency and then they want gigabit internet off of satellites i want
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gigabit internet it sounds great yeah that that's cool because yeah it's cool because you have a little dish you can
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carry it around with you anywhere you could just be in your you know camper van in the middle of the woods and you could get gigabit internet and
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it's kind of amazing right like sounds like a great promise yeah yeah yeah exactly it's one of those things where like we have wired internet right now
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and everything you said doesn't happen like yeah the best i've ever had is fios like
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800 or 900 down but even like playing games like valor and pinging to an east coast server we're on the east
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coast it's like 20 to 30 right yeah and like one ms is in
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or it's sounds like 10 is what they're aiming for even 10. i don't think i've ever seen 10 ms ping
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any game i've ever played in my life yeah so so the project's actually been around for a while i know you said you
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only kind of recently heard of it it's only because it's starting to just recently start percolating and like get
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online it actually was uh announced in 2015 the project's been in development for quite
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a while but they only got the first two beta tested satellites up in 2018. okay
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so it hasn't really been in orbit for that long um and after they tested those satellites
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they actually got they were able to move more satellites into even lower earth orbit so something
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i should explain here is that the reason starlink can be so fast is because they are in a part of orbit called low earth
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orbit which means they're much closer to earth but because they're much closer to earth they move really fast they're not in the
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orbit where they're turning with the planet they're not rocketing across the sky right okay so does that mean when
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you're on the ground you're going to be switching between satellites over and over again yeah they kind of create this big mesh network cool and when they work
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always work yeah right right yeah um and when they launch them up
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there they deploy like 60 at a time and it's really interesting you can kind of see these like these chains of starling
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satellites that are just going across the sky together and it's really interesting but when you
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have satellites that are shooting across the sky that fast you have to put a lot more of them up there because obviously
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like you said you're going to lose signal quickly and like yes because of the inverse square law and because of
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advancements in internet technology we have like way faster internet from them now but you're going to
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try to keep linking to new locations constantly this is reminding me very much of 5g
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millimeter wave every time you hear about these millimeter wave towers and you walk by one on the street and you
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get one millisecond ping and a gigabit down and then you keep walking you've got to find the next one otherwise you're not
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connected it is it is very similar to that idea right yeah yeah yeah oh
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wow so those are that is one constellation of starling satellites it looks like have you ever played snake
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dot io yeah yeah yeah it looks like that you can just see them like stars movies yeah yeah yeah yeah so this
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this kind of like gets into this whole thing right this is quite interesting i mean for audio listeners it was
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basically just it looks like if just orion's belt was even closer together times 20 and just
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like moving across the sky yeah that's fascinating so those were the first 60 that got deployed in may 2019 okay okay
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so like they they send up this pod and then as they get into orbit they just start deploying
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and all of a sudden you've got this constellation and they're all kind of linked together in the smash network shooting down internet
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game time how many satellites would you guys say we're in space right now
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how many satellites are in space yeah like wow space are orbit or just space in general space most of them are in
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space there's a lot of dead satellites that are just like yeah just falling out of orbit or just kind of you do know a
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lot of fun facts about space yeah um if i was guessing how many there are are we assuming we're the only intelligent life
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i think so i think that's fair because it's not okay in earth orbit currently in earth launched from or
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earth yes everything launches from earth yes i think this is the lodge from mars i love
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all the feathers i'm saying you know i think there's probably um
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400 satellites 400 in earth's orbit okay any guess i make is just completely
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blind i'll august 401
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um how many would you say have ever been launched in history altogether
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satellites oh i guess i just assumed when they break they just stay out in space and i was
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counting them so that used to be how it works okay they like come back they can't even some can now fall yeah
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let's go with 800 ever so 400 now 800 ever yeah okay it's probably like a like
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one of these curves like this yeah like for the last hundred years not very many than a couple hundred years because we
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didn't launch very much yeah and then then we just started getting all of them and now half of them are out of orbit yeah that's my guess okay so
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uh 12 020 have ever been launched okay that's a lot more than 800. yeah
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and that is that is like that has been bolstered very recently i will say that uh
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7520 are still in space right now i was closer
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wow 7 000 okay and for about 4 500 are active so almost half of those that are
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in space are not doing anything right now right um and those are all numbers from august
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21 2021 according to the european space agency who kind of keeps date on this so
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it's very very very active only a couple months prior when i was doing this uh
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initially it was only about 6 000 in space as of like the beginning of the year so that's been a lot and if you
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especially when you consider that 12 000 have only been ever launched and in only a few months yeah 1 12 of that has been
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accelerated right all right you know where they're launching from i think like
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cape canaveral or something um yeah i'm not entirely sure
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specifically where but i know that they're usually around the equator okay so wherever they do launch from
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it's probably it just seems because you said earlier six thousand now there's seven so that means a thousand of them have oh but it's like a positive since
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january yeah it's not like each individual launch no each individual launch is about sixty
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seven okay so they go up together wow um still a lot of launches in a couple months okay yeah so so starlink um
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decent part of this uh how many would you guys guess that starlink is
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trying to launch right now as sort of part of their little network well like a golden
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and like that they're going to like they have authorization i'm guessing they want it next year
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like two years basically they want to finish the job they want to like cover the entire earth and
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and have this whole thing available for everyone on earth i guess that's the goal right yeah cause i mean it's they have to have sort of
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this mesh network they're moving really quickly right you know what would your guess be maybe they want to double it
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maybe they want seven thousand more satellites i was gonna go like cover the hours yeah yeah yeah that's a lot forty
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two thousand satellites whoa okay that's my satellite they have authorization to launch not only that
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they want to but they already have authorization sheesh from the fcc
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okay that's a lot that's a lot it's just i'm still my eye keeps thinking about that clip you just showed us of like
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watching 60 in a row pass by you in the night sky with your naked eye
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just imagining the sky like looking like it's moving all the time and then getting like motion sick like looking up
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the cars like rotating around yeah yeah yeah it's a little different right like stars um
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that we see in the night sky they they don't really they're moving but not really but yeah we're kind of
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moving around then it's a different way um okay so yeah so the reason that we
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found this topic at all title card um is that uh adam actually sent me this
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article called spacex dark satellites are still too bright for astronomers
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um it was in scientific american and i thought um this is interesting uh
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the article basically says that yeah starlink is very cool you know it's a great idea
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um but it's be creating a lot of issues for astronomers they are reflecting
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light off of from like the sun and it's kind of messing up things in
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astronomy a lot of different types of astronomy interesting yeah so there's telescopes on earth that are trying to
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look at things far far away and these these satellites are flying in between
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the telescope and the thing they're looking at and reflecting light back into them that they don't need in their data right so if you're generally if
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you're doing like a long exposure photo for example like all astronomers do super long exposures they do up to like
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two days right of exposures and with the geosynchronous orbit satellites they know exactly where they
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are at all times they can just point the satellite a different direction they're able to do it they can avoid it and there's not that many right because they
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you don't need to have that many if they're in geosynchronous orbit because you always have a connection with these they're just flying through
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and you don't really know where the path of them is and when you can avoid them and and the fact that like
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you know right now there have only been a couple thousand that have been launched and that's already creating a problem
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yeah what happens when there are 42 000. um
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so at first these starling satellites were like really really bright right they were they were reflecting light from the sun
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and basically astronomers would like you know they'd point their satellites at them and they'd be like oh a star and
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then they'd look they'd point their telescope telescope yeah they'd be like oh look a star and then they would see
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oh that's oh that's a satellite that's actually a satellite now it's moving too fast yeah so both it was moving too fast
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and then it was like it's just too freaking bright and um there's all these different issues that it was creating because
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these were reflecting so much light that it could actually damage the telescope because their sensors are really really
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sensitive and light from stars are so far away and because of that inverse
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square law the light from a star is like you're getting way less light than it's actually emitting whereas the
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satellite reflecting all that sunlight beaming it's like when you take a magnify magnifying glass on an ant right
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you're kind of burning the sensor you can actually break the sensor because they're so bright uh so that was kind of a major issue and
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like credit to starlink um they don't want to necessarily just
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they want to work with the astronomers right um it's kind of this like 50 50 word thing where like yeah we're gonna
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do this uh we got authorization and we're just gonna do it we'll try to mitigate the problems that we create but
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we're still gonna do it i have a question yeah about these astronomers are these amateur astronomers are these
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professional astronomers because when i think of astronomers there's obviously telescopes on earth huge observatories
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that have to look through the atmosphere but there's also telescopes in orbit that i assume are
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above a lot of these satellites and they do that for an unobstructed view of the atmosphere yeah how much of these
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astronomers complaining are professional astronomers versus hobbyists in the backyard yeah both so a
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lot of professional astronomers i'm going to guess just because it's cameras and long exposure that kind of when i
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was first thinking of this i was thinking of like oh someone looking with their eye through a telescope and it like reflecting light but if it sounds
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like if it's destroying long exposure like astrophotography not even astrophotography like yeah it's like
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astronomers deep space yeah yeah yeah no it's it's both um basically they do eventually a lot of
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these astronomers that i talked to did say that they eventually are going to probably need to put satellites into
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space but right now uh one of the ones that they've been working on for the last basically since like 2008 it's called
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the lsst it's in chile and it's pretty much the biggest uh
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telescope that has ever been created it has the biggest sensor that has ever been made it's like multiple gigapixels
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uh and it takes like up to two minutes or two day photos basically these things and the
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the point of this is to like explore things like dark matter and just like
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different universes and galaxies and just things that we've never seen before and then i think we're going to borrow it for a little bit and shoot a
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smartphone review with it i think that's the plan yeah yeah turn around point it back across that'll be fun too yeah that'd be cool
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yeah yeah um and they basically said to put a telescope like this into space they're just way too big way too heavy
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it's right now it's just too much to get that into orbit they're so massive these
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are huge telescopes um so yeah so like sterling was you know they were still trying to work with
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astronomers because they they understood that like yeah this is kind of a problem we're still gonna do it but it's kind of
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a problem so they worked with astronomers to create these conferences uh called satcon there's satcon1 satcon
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2 that have happened so far after satcon 1 they basically were like okay the
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biggest issue right now is that these are reflecting too much light and there is different degrees of
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brightness where it becomes not as much of an issue for the astronomers
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so they tried different things they painted the satellites black they placed
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they're darker they're darker so they're not reflecting as much light uh starlink sends those up
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they start burning up and heating up like a crapload because the temperature
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difference um when the earth is facing the sun versus when it's not facing sun
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very big difference it gets really hot and really cold in space yeah yeah so that that became an issue it was
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overheating all the sterling satellites okay um now they actually do something called visor sat uh which is actually
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putting little basically putting sunglasses on the satellites cool yeah you know
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which kind of like it darkens it for the astronomers and then one other thing that they do is um during the periods of
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time when the astronomers need to be seeing into space these satellites will rotate their
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solar cells to be a knife's edge versus the earth that's cool so now instead of blocking this amount
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you're only blocking like this amount right does that affect that the internet that they're no sending okay that's mostly that's
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just for power okay so it's collecting power while the astronomers sort of don't need to use it okay yeah um but we
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found this article really intriguing because it was like it seemed like there could be a lot more to this it was also written a couple of years ago uh so i
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really wanted to like catch up with the update right because things like the lsst the new
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telescope in chile it was actually supposed to go into service like end of this year or next
00:23:56
year which is crazy because it's being been being worked on since 2008. imagine you get all of this funding it's the
00:24:03
biggest astronomical project of all time and all of a sudden the entire atmosphere just becomes littered yeah in
00:24:10
orbit with all these satellites wow it's crazy right it's funny that like i'm picturing uh if you zoom way out from
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earth it's like oh earth these earthlings want to connect with like other like maybe intelligent civilizations but they've surrounded
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their own planet with too much space junk to actually communicate or like see anything and that's kind of a bleak and that is
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that is a concern that we'll get into later um adam uh so we called up emily who is the
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person that emily zang she's the person that wrote this article for scientific american i'm emily zhang i recently
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graduated from columbia university i did some freelance science journalism which is how this article came about
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and i currently work for the veritasium youtube channel um so this article
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i majored in astrophysics so my background is in astronomy and naturally one of the biggest conflicts or concerns
00:25:03
in the astronomical community at the time that i wrote the article and i would say today is satellite
00:25:09
constellations so she was an astrophysicist and now she works for very testing which is kind of amazing kind of shows that like you can go to
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school for anything and still be a youtuber the internet at the end of the day the internet um yeah so
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the biggest thing that she wanted to really highlight to us when we called her was that this is kind of happening
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with astronomers not really being able to do anything about it right it's kind of just like there's no laws really
00:25:36
about space we just i think the main sentiment would be powerlessness because i think these
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astronomers they're not saying like down with with spacex and starlink and blue origin and
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and project kuiper and all of these forever um i think we understand that
00:25:53
you know there are multiple parties involved and we're gonna have to compromise but the main thing is that
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i think we just astronomers haven't really been able to do anything at all
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um and so having to sit on the sidelines while what you study and what your expertise is in is is being dominated by
00:26:10
these other forces that are very new to the game is uh yeah i think it's it's difficult to just
00:26:17
have to be a bystander to that i would say it's pretty concerning that internationally and and even nationally
00:26:23
we're not seeing much discussion about regulation about laws around this there's this space treaty that was
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written during the space race but it was very vague it
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was specifically written between nation states so not about individual corporations and companies and really
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the main thing that it wanted to highlight was not being able to use space for like war purposes like there
00:26:48
were still ways there's loopholes that were written in so that you probably could use it for war purposes but the
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idea was like you count you can't mount a rocket launcher on the moon you can't like
00:27:00
make a giant space laser that is mounted somewhere but again this this space
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treaty was written literally in the 60s during the original space race uh the world has changed a lot since then
00:27:11
clearly a little and i don't think it took into account the fact that now instead of there being a space race
00:27:18
between individual countries it is now billionaire corporations right there's
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like even recently in the news it's been the billionaire space race what's being called the dawn of a new
00:27:30
space age billionaire richard branson now though tomorrow another billionaire is paying his way into space 71 year old
00:27:36
branson beating amazon founder jeff bezos to space by just nine days we've got jeff bezos versus elon musk versus
00:27:43
uh the virgin galactic guy um yeah i don't know richard branson richard branson
00:27:49
uh and all these people are just like sending themselves into space they're sending other people into space
00:27:55
and it's kind of just a flex um but the fact that it is now individuals
00:28:01
kind of makes this a lot more complicated because at least the un can kind of like make these treaties and
00:28:07
talk about who can do what but the nature of capitalism is to produce more and better than your
00:28:14
competition and when you have these companies like amazon slash blue origin you've got spacex you've got facebook
00:28:22
that are all wanting to get on top of each other and just beat each other out then then what do you do
00:28:29
so anyway but what emily was kind of trying to say was that like this is all happening right this is all
00:28:34
exponentially growing and these astronomers don't really have a big say in it yeah it makes me think
00:28:40
about like how how far above a country is still the country i'm sure there's some rule about this there is no rule
00:28:45
about this because obviously if you fly over another you mean like you're a certain airspace yeah that's that's one
00:28:51
thing but if you're at 40 000 feet or if you're at 100 000 feet like where does that end
00:28:59
so it's like there's not really a and then the other thing is like the satellites are just like streaking right they're going so fast
00:29:05
that it's like they're in one country in another country in another country the issue is is we've got a similar situation again like we have with
00:29:11
certain types of social media and so on so forth where technology is advancing faster than regulations could give up
00:29:17
that was jeremy he's an astrophysicist we talked to in chile sort of like facebook and twitter and
00:29:23
all these things we're just now trying to figure out how do you regulate social media and holy crap we're way past the
00:29:29
point where we should have regulated this yeah exactly you know um and so that's the thing about space right now is like and so that got in my
00:29:36
head like how how do you regulate this because again like you said that's it's
00:29:41
something that's way up in orbit it's not in a country and then the other thing is there's not
00:29:47
a lot of incentive for individual governments to necessarily regulate it because like who regulates
00:29:53
it right and and also your like your country's gdp is determined by how much output it
00:30:01
makes and so if there are more companies in your country that want to create like get into this newfound
00:30:07
frontier that makes a lot of money you don't really have any incentive to say no so you want to learn a little bit more
00:30:13
about how this is going to go what the astronomers and astrophysicists think about this how they feel about it specifically what they said about like
00:30:19
moving at the pace of social media how we could possibly regulate it who is going to regulate it you know this is like seems like un untouched territory
00:30:27
like nobody knows what to do are we all on the same page that it should be regulated like the obvious
00:30:32
path is that they're about to put 40 000 new satellites into orbit and it's gonna
00:30:37
really suck for astronomers on earth which is most astronomers yeah something should be done or they're just gonna do
00:30:44
it for everyone on earth if we don't regulate it right at some point and actually there was this uh tweet that i
00:30:50
saw that said once spacex gets 12 000 of the 42 000 up and originally they had
00:30:57
only asked for 12 000 and it got accepted and then it got accepted so easily that very soon after they were
00:31:03
like can we put 30 000 more and the fcc was like sure and it was like what they didn't really
00:31:10
have any reason to say no yeah yes they didn't think of any but is it going to be bad for us on earth because now the
00:31:16
night sky looks different or will we will we even be able to see that multiple things there
00:31:21
was a tweet that i saw that uh that's basically said once the 12 000 are up the number of satellites that we will be
00:31:28
able to see will outnumber the amount of stars we will be able to see so the night sky will we'll we kind of
00:31:35
think they're just depending on where they are satellites and to be fair the way that they are
00:31:40
visor setting these and all these things uh a lot of times it can make it so it's
00:31:45
hard to see with your naked eye especially during the day um you'll most easily be able to see
00:31:51
them at don and dusk and the fear is that the worst affected science is actually some of the most
00:31:57
important that was jonathan mcdowell an astrophysicist at harvard it's the uh science where you're doing
00:32:04
wide area surveys looking at a lot of sky low near the horizon uh early in the
00:32:11
evening at twilight which is where the satellites are absolutely the worst
00:32:17
but that's where you have to look to find the asteroid that's going to hit the earth
00:32:22
and so that what we call planetary defense uh subset of astronomy is the one that's
00:32:28
potentially most threatened so we might lose that kind of uh astronomy
00:32:34
which is not great yeah so for context there are about the upper estimates are about 10 000 visible
00:32:40
stars in the night sky at night depending regardless of where you are on earth oh yeah yeah so it'll
00:32:46
outnumber pretty easily and um you know a lot of people said like you know you won't be able to see them with your naked eye but there's so many issues
00:32:53
because not only uh is it going to you know is it emitting all this stuff
00:32:59
but also even if you turn the wings so that their knife's edge towards
00:33:04
the earth the core part of the satellite is still blocking a light signal from coming through of a potential
00:33:11
you know a potential star that you're trying to observe right you're trying to observe the star and you can just get these huge streaks
00:33:18
that just fly through your image when you're using when you're doing long exposure stuff right
00:33:23
yeah so this is when a single satellite flies through hubble's field of view
00:33:29
wow it's just a big slash straight through your image yep you know you're getting this deep space image honestly
00:33:36
that'd probably make for a really good youtube intro sequence [Music]
00:33:43
hey what's up mkbhd here and bright white streak through the sky yeah i mean it's like it's crazy because there's so
00:33:49
many random elements of it that you can tell are natural and then there's just this perfectly straight line like
00:33:54
straight through the middle yeah beautiful stars and then just straight line and just like imagine that's like one telescope
00:34:01
oh my gosh that's one satellite yeah imagine what happens when you've got potentially
00:34:06
hundreds or thousands that are coming in and that's interesting because hubble is one of the atmospheric telescopes it's
00:34:12
already orbiting earth but it's lower orbit than a lot of these low orbit earth satellites wow so this is even
00:34:18
messing with those even if you put uh these telescopes into space then you could still have satellites
00:34:24
coming through which is wild that's brutal just wild wow yeah um i love hubble i know hubble's so dope
00:34:31
and they're actually gonna replace hubble pretty soon right um which is cool as well uh but yeah so she we wanted to learn
00:34:37
more about this uh so she had us call up these two people this one guy named jeremy tregolone reed
00:34:44
who is an astronomer in chile and an astrophysicist named jonathan mcdowell
00:34:49
at harvard so we first called up jeremy in chile um
00:34:54
and surprise surprise our call had a lot of issues a lot of problems his internet was not great
00:35:00
and we actually had to call him a second time a couple weeks later because we tried to salvage the call we had but
00:35:06
even during the call it was like i heard every fifth word that he said and i tried to make sense of what he was saying and it just like didn't work well
00:35:13
and then the service that we use that does the podcasting interviews just
00:35:18
couldn't upload his side we only got 15 minutes of raw data and it was just not good sounds like we need starlight yeah
00:35:24
so that was that's that's the funny thing is he was like this is really affecting my work
00:35:31
but i could really use one of these star links right now it was just it was it was so ironic
00:35:37
um we asked him about that lsst telescope and he just said like you know
00:35:44
yes i've seen it as things stand at this precise moment in time yes i do see it
00:35:50
as being a major development issue this could be such a major issue because
00:35:55
they've been working on it since like 2008 and then all of a sudden there's gonna be thousands just flying through and the lsat the lsst works on more than
00:36:02
just optical stuff it also does radio um telescope work radio astronomy
00:36:08
which starlink specifically is another problem for because not only are you
00:36:13
blocking uh the light that's coming if you're doing radio astronomy and you're listening they're listening for literally black holes right they're
00:36:20
listening for energy coming out of black holes which is wild and there's just these faint whispers
00:36:27
from you know wherever the heck and they're in chile and there's no signal coming through they're literally
00:36:33
listening for black holes yeah and then you think about okay there's this satellite that's whizzing by not only is
00:36:39
it brighter than it should be and it's blocking potential signals from coming through it's also shooting down
00:36:46
gigabit internet which is a radio signal puking in it all
00:36:51
over the telescope and and he was telling me that these that whiz by they could literally just make the your
00:36:56
entire image just white and radio astronomy is a lot more sensitive some of these objects are thousands of
00:37:03
times brighter than the sun is to these radio telescopes and the saturn calls burn out of the equipment and you know
00:37:08
damage equipment which that costs money to replace and loss of you know observing time because you integrate for the equipment to replace
00:37:15
some of the space telescopes we take a two-day exposure uh and so because we're looking for
00:37:21
ludicrously faint things right and so you know go oh here's a
00:37:26
here's a light ray from that star here's another light ray from this
00:37:32
right and and so it doesn't take so when you have a bloody bright satellite going overhead
00:37:39
it leaves a really bright trail on your image that saturates the detector that's
00:37:44
trying to look for so much fainter stuff they could literally just make the your entire image just white yeah like it can
00:37:50
completely ruin the image and it could also be one of the things that breaks the telescope and
00:37:57
this telescope there's been millions and millions of dollars invested into this telescope and so the fact that they've
00:38:03
been working on this basically since 2008 it's supposed to be operational by 2023 it was supposed to be 2022 but then
00:38:08
coveted and then out of nowhere cup like a couple years before you open all of a sudden the
00:38:15
orbit just starts being filled it's kind of ridiculous like it's not really fair right it's like building like a beachfront property and then they by the
00:38:21
time you're done they build another property right in front of the ocean yeah yeah pretty much
00:38:27
pretty much you spend 10 years building it and then all of a sudden the condo goes up right yeah or something this
00:38:32
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dot com slash waveform it could save you hundreds a year alright so we're back again we got two
00:40:52
independent recommendations for jonathan mcdowell this astrophysicist at harvard
00:40:57
and uh he proceeded to sort of blow our minds about like how ridiculous this is
00:41:02
all going the the bottom line is there's nowhere to hide from these satellites right it's also a
00:41:08
problem for radio astronomy uh uh we're in the we have these radio telescopes in very
00:41:14
isolated regions where there's no radio transmissions in the vicinity except for
00:41:20
satellites coming overhead lots of radio track very bright radio
00:41:25
transmissions and even if they're in a fairly narrow band mostly if one percent leaks out into a slightly different
00:41:31
frequency we're trying to listen to these incredibly faint whispers from distant
00:41:37
you know creating black holes and and a tiny amount of bleed off from this super
00:41:42
loud searchlight radio satellite uh is just gonna swamp us what if orbit is
00:41:48
just totally filled with signals from these satellites and we can't listen for these whispers anymore we're basically
00:41:55
creating this kind of like dome around the earth where we can't listen outside of it right we can't look
00:42:02
for things outside of it we can't listen for things outside of it and he is convinced that there is going to be a
00:42:07
catastrophic failure event before anything is actually done about
00:42:13
this problem um have you guys heard of uh kessler syndrome before
00:42:19
kessler kessler syndrome i have not heard can't say i have no okay uh so in orbit things are really just
00:42:25
falling they're in free fall right uh that's something i think a lot of people don't actually realize is that they're just far away from
00:42:32
enough from the earth so that they are falling towards the earth but they're also falling in a direction in a vector
00:42:38
away from the earth and they're at a such uh direction that they're just kind of like spinning
00:42:44
because it's just this combination of downward force and then outward force and it kind of creates this angled
00:42:50
vector so when things are in free fall they can fall really fast right
00:42:56
so kessler syndrome is when you get something in orbit that hits another thing in orbit
00:43:02
and then it creates shrapnel in orbit and that creates more shrapnel and then
00:43:08
that hits more stuff which creates more shrapnel this reminds me of a scene in interstellar yeah i haven't seen that
00:43:15
movie i watched it like two weekends ago but there is an explosion of one satellite in space and some of the
00:43:20
shrapnel is heading towards some of the astronauts because the thing exploded and it's going everywhere and then there's a part in the movie where all
00:43:26
the shrapnel arrives and it tears a hole and the spaceship and the space station has a hole in it now right yeah yeah i
00:43:33
mean so how how fast do you guys think that things move oh they're going fast
00:43:38
when they're orbiting yeah i've seen videos from the international space station where that is also orbiting and
00:43:45
it's going like 20 25 000 miles an hour like it's you they orbit the earth like
00:43:50
eight times in a day which is some insane number i have no idea what i assume two things
00:43:55
colliding at that speed is just instant destruction of both those things pretty much instantly yeah yeah yeah so
00:44:02
things are in free fall generally around 17 000 miles per hour yeah there's um something happened to
00:44:09
the iss recently a few years ago where like it was like a piece of debris a paint
00:44:15
chip something came off of a satellite hit the iss it was so tiny it was like a
00:44:21
particle and it left a crater in the iss like this big oh my goodness yeah like a
00:44:26
softball size yeah that's crazy sorry to interrupt by the way the movie you were thinking of was crap gravity oh
00:44:40
yeah and there was a scene where it destroyed maybe it was gravity maybe it was did it
00:44:47
have sandra bullock
00:44:53
yeah so things are moving at 70 000 miles per hour basically it just causes chain reactions right and
00:44:58
and so i'm starting to get nervous he's telling me about this stuff and i'm like okay um so you've got spacex and amazon
00:45:07
blue origin and facebook and boeing these are all companies that are confirmed to be putting satellites into
00:45:13
space right this is just the united states um if spacex themselves starlink
00:45:18
is putting forward 2000 up amazon is supposed to put a few thousand up already they are confirmed to be doing this facebook is
00:45:25
trying to put up a little mini constellation facebook wow okay yeah uh boeing and it's just like these are
00:45:31
just us companies again yeah and they really have not a lot of incentive
00:45:36
to talk to each other besides like maybe the fear of kessler syndrome happening but there's this estimate by
00:45:44
that by like a couple years from now there's going to be over a hundred thousand satellites in space right
00:45:50
and yes orbit is very large and there's a lot of room but yeah it's pretty big
00:45:55
but it's not infinite you know and it's very to me it's very similar to the oceans because people thought the same thing in the
00:46:00
oceans is like they're really big we can throw lots of crap in there forever and
00:46:06
it'll never make a difference oops no it didn't quite it doesn't work that way and and so uh
00:46:14
that's the same with space space is famously big when you have a hundred thousand satellites even one creating
00:46:20
shrapnel and you no longer have the ability to control that shrapnel and
00:46:25
it's going everywhere you can't really like if the chunks are big enough you could probably track it but if they're
00:46:31
shrapnel which like you know of little paint chip came off and damaged the iss you can't really track that it's just gonna go everywhere yeah is it no longer
00:46:38
uh are we just creating this sort of like radio bubble where we can't hear anything outside of the earth
00:46:44
if you have a hundred thousand satellites creating shrapnel you're gonna create this dome of
00:46:50
seventeen thousand mile per hour shrapnel around the earth where you can no longer send anything into space
00:46:56
do you remember that article this was probably a few months ago where there was a i think it was a chinese satellite
00:47:03
that had like lost communication or power or something and was going to fall out of orbit but we didn't know where
00:47:09
because it was not being communicated yeah and it was it was sort of a trending topic for a couple days where
00:47:15
we were like it's on the path of this you can follow the path we just don't know when it's going to land it
00:47:21
could land in the pacific ocean oh but now it's over new mexico oh but now it's over the atlantic ocean and just keeps
00:47:26
going and growing i feel like uh maybe one of these events he's talking about looks kind of like that where one
00:47:32
thing starts to fall out of orbit and as soon as you can't communicate with it it could hit another thing and then
00:47:39
then that's the chain reaction yeah and it creates almost a uh what is that there's this uh this is idea of creating
00:47:45
like a sphere around the earth that creates this self-sustaining biosphere by biosphere sort of we create
00:47:52
that but it's bad it's all shrapnel you know and it's like it's like we're saturn but except it's a sphere and it's
00:47:58
a moat but now you can't yeah right yeah and so so like to be fair the newer satellites have um avoidance
00:48:05
systems where they're able to sort of like if they track something coming towards them they they can avoid they
00:48:11
can dodge things they can dodge things technology is crazy yeah yeah um there was this event that happened where
00:48:17
the space force um now us phase four yeah noticed that the
00:48:23
one of the starling satellites was coming within it technically like
00:48:28
10 times the limit that it allows which i think was still like
00:48:33
a couple kilometers it's still very curious how close they actually get it was it was a couple kilometers or a few
00:48:38
kilometers and they they were like it's probably not gonna hit it but this is still 10 times over our limit and so
00:48:45
they have propulsion systems in the starlink satellites that allow them to kind of move
00:48:50
but still it's more of a communication thing right because you get all of these companies
00:48:56
and so i started thinking about what happens when
00:49:01
every other country starts getting in the game obviously china's competing with us russia's competing with us india
00:49:06
is competing with us the uk uh there's things this one internet company called oneweb from the uk that's
00:49:13
also teamed up with india that's putting stuff into space and individual countries have even less
00:49:19
incentive to communicate with other countries right the only incentive that they really have
00:49:25
in this whole satellite space race is it costs them money if their satellites break by hitting other people's
00:49:31
satellites which is crazy and again it's like the fcc and the epa the environmental
00:49:36
protection agency they're kind of pointing fingers at each other as to like who should be regulating this and so now the issue on
00:49:43
light pollution really is that nobody seems to be feeling responsible for it right that's
00:49:49
joseph kohler he's a space policy strategist at aerospace.org if you if
00:49:54
you look at um some announcements from like the epa the
00:49:59
environmental protection agency they have clearly stated that they feel that by pollution you know from space on
00:50:07
the ground is in their job char of responsibilities however they also provided since
00:50:14
i think since 1986 for for many years they've provided the fcc with a categorical exclusion right
00:50:21
basically telling them telling the fcc okay you just go forward and provide your spectrum licenses and we don't have
00:50:28
to look at those constellations from a light pollution perspective it's very weird it's like it's just uncharted
00:50:33
territory quite literally is it littering if you put up a satellite it falls down on the earth did you litter
00:50:38
do you get charged for littering i think so i think there was actually a thing that that happened where they said like
00:50:44
if your satellite crashes in another country the country is liable for any damages that happens right i think the one that
00:50:50
did end up falling out of orbit disintegrated before it hit anything yeah so a lot of the spacex um
00:50:57
starling satellites are made now to burn up uh in orbit but something else that jonathan mcdowell told us was like okay
00:51:05
so these are made to be able to go out of commission you can propulsion them into low enough orbit so they ended up
00:51:11
just falling into the atmosphere and disintegrating but we also don't know
00:51:17
what that much heavy metal is going to do with to our atmosphere right like we're already worried about putting too
00:51:22
much carbon in our atmosphere so that got us really concerned especially for the the multiple countries just not
00:51:30
wanting to communicate with each other and like i said earlier uh the more gdp that your country is
00:51:36
pumping out the better your country's doing and a lot of countries are just very happy to have the higher gdp
00:51:41
you know um and a lot of these countries are wanted to be with the u.s too and then there's individual companies within
00:51:47
those countries and it just kind of creates this exponential thing because it's like yes there's going to be a hundred thousand launching from the us
00:51:53
in the next couple years let's not even think about china and russia and india and the uk like you
00:52:00
know it's ridiculous it doesn't sound like there's a clear good solution no
00:52:05
like controlling space is probably the biggest question mark like obviously we we want to everyone wants to be the one
00:52:11
that controls space and i feel like i've seen this meme on twitter of like you should buy land on mars because
00:52:17
some somebody will buy it from you later and you just who are you going to buy the land from like who owns that land now i don't know
00:52:23
there's a lot of questions about ownership of that space right i don't know if there's an answer to it right just like vice president
00:52:29
vice president it's like just because the us put a flag in the moon doesn't mean we own them yeah like you know that
00:52:34
could be yeah it's just the moon yeah yeah that that just all got me thinking about regulation like how do we slow
00:52:39
this down how do we make sure this is done safely like it's just going to happen whether or not we
00:52:45
want it to which kind of sucks and the us can't just say like okay we're going to take control of this
00:52:51
but we already let starlink put 42 000 up we can't say no to amazon now we can't say no to facebook now when we
00:52:57
already said yes i mean they could but then it's you know i don't know it seems they
00:53:03
should just set a this is my complete amateurism talking
00:53:08
this is just at a hard limit we will not allow more than x satellites to orbit earth at
00:53:15
once right and i guess that's not a great answer because that just makes it a race for who can have all the fastest yeah but
00:53:22
like look if the us puts a limit and says a hundred thousand what happens when every other country is
00:53:28
like oh cool the u.s is self-limiting themselves oh yeah we're gonna play a million we have no
00:53:34
limits we're just gonna keep going because the one that creates that controls most of the network kind of is
00:53:40
the winner we've seen the same thing with 5g you know with huawei and qualcomm and everyone's trying to like
00:53:45
control the most broadband there's a lot of parallels to 5g oh yeah yeah oh yeah all these all these uh like it's an
00:53:52
infrastructure thing there's a lot of unfounded concerns about 5g as well but there are still very valid concerns
00:53:57
about like you're gonna have to have a tower on every block in all of the world that's
00:54:03
just too much new metal like there's just too much stuff to have around yeah um yeah yeah
00:54:08
it's interesting yeah it's it's and it's all it all comes down to wavelengths right it all comes down to basic physics where the faster you can move your
00:54:14
wavelength the closer you have to be to that wave but yeah i mean jonathan was
00:54:20
he was convinced that we were eventually going to have star wars because uh the outer space treaty of 1967 says you
00:54:26
can't put weapons of mass destruction in space you can't station them in space
00:54:32
so actually if you read the treaty carefully you can put like high explosive
00:54:38
space fighters out there that's completely consistent with the treaty um there's nothing in the treaty that
00:54:44
says i can't come up to you in my x-wing fighter and and uh blow you out of the sky as long as i'm
00:54:50
not using weapons of mass destruction to do it right you're not allowed to mount anything on any like
00:54:56
body in space but you can send like a warhead through space if you wanted to
00:55:03
yeah so you could shoot it into orbit and then have it land somewhere else yeah interesting so i wanted to like figure out how the
00:55:09
heck do we start regulating this obviously a lot of these astronomers have a very
00:55:14
kind of negative very doomsday-esque idea of what will happen
00:55:20
and the general sense that i got from all of them was kind of this just like yeah
00:55:27
yeah we're screwed like the hobby yeah this almost happy like depression like is what i was getting um yeah so so
00:55:35
jonathan mcdowell it was funny he was like don't worry the united states will absolutely use orbit for war and i was
00:55:42
like cool cool cool great cool cool fun yeah great great great love it we should make uh another one of those treaties
00:55:48
yeah i brought that up actually i said do you think that there will be a new space treaty that's going to be written
00:55:54
up there's been a lot of discussion about that this the treaty is 50 years old
00:56:00
and it's really showing its age it's all written in terms of you know the assumption is that all the
00:56:06
satellites are either soviet or american right right um and and space is a lot more
00:56:13
complicated now and so those assumptions don't hold uh
00:56:18
and it's sort of being kind of duct taped to keep working
00:56:25
uh um but yeah there needs to be a new outer space treaty i think and and the question is how can we get one it's not
00:56:32
gonna be easy and he said honestly i don't think it'll happen anytime soon
00:56:38
uh if it does it's gonna be after things have gone bad and again there's just kind of this so i
00:56:43
don't want to like you know this product has to be super downer but it seems like treaties
00:56:48
usually come after things are headed the right yeah that's what it seems like he's saying yes nobody really listens and people are
00:56:55
screaming into the void until there's a major problem yeah you know gotta get everybody on the same page yeah wow so i kind of i was wondering like there's got
00:57:01
to be somebody that is that is trying to regulate this or trying to create regulation for this
00:57:06
right like this can't just be happening and and nobody is working on some sort of regulation because if i'm this freaked
00:57:13
out right now as an individual who just called a few people on the phone you know there's got to be other people
00:57:19
so i found this website uh it says organization called aerospace.org
00:57:24
and they're this third party organization that creates
00:57:30
kind of policy that they recommend to people like nasa or governments different governments
00:57:36
they try to you know figure they do testing to figure out how much of a problem these things in space are going
00:57:42
to be and then they do math on them and say like because of this data we say that this should be the way that things
00:57:48
should be um so a couple people that i talked to about about that uh and mostly
00:57:55
i came away with them sort of feeling like well
00:58:01
there's gonna be a monetary incentive for these companies to make these things safer mostly because of that kessler
00:58:07
syndrome thing and also because people do care to an extent
00:58:12
right still worried about the communications issues and all of the like telescope problems that you're going to have when you have all of these
00:58:19
satellites going over the top but a lot of these people were kind of under the
00:58:24
assumption that it would regulate itself in a way which i'm mixed i'm quite mixed on personally
00:58:32
um they they kind of figured like because if you create issues like satellites
00:58:38
running into each other there's going to be such a monetary issue where you're blowing up your own money and then
00:58:44
you're also going to probably have to pay to clean up whatever happens the other thing about
00:58:49
the financials is that in theory with that much scale it gets cheaper and cheaper to launch satellites
00:58:56
like we're supposed to have reusable rockets and we're supposed to be able to do this thing way more efficiently kind
00:59:01
of sounds like you know there's millions of cars on the road and it's in everyone's best interest not to crash
00:59:07
but if a couple crash like yeah they're going to crash the numbers but kessler syndrome doesn't happen on earth you know
00:59:13
we've got gravity not quite right right right but even even to that same this just the idea of like
00:59:20
it's in everyone's best interest not to ever crash into any other satellite but there's going to be so many right
00:59:26
that comes up mathematically like it's probably going to happen a couple times hopefully
00:59:32
with the best of the tech available it won't spiral out and out of control yeah some
00:59:37
event but um they're just gonna have to deal with the financial repercussions yeah a couple of
00:59:42
those and that's something emily was talking about was like it is a really really expensive endeavor and one could
00:59:49
argue very inefficient um and so because of that you know
00:59:55
the the dream for starlink i'm sure and these other companies is they figure out a way to make it cost effective and over
01:00:02
time you know the technology develops further further it will get cheaper but right now it's it's incredibly expensive
01:00:08
it still is and what they're sending up right now is costing them billions it costs a crapload to launch these
01:00:14
satellites right now right it's so expensive and starlink's goal is to bring high-speed internet to everyone at
01:00:21
a very low cost right now the 500 dish plus hundred dollars per month is not exactly bringing not accessible to every
01:00:28
accessible internet to people who don't have access currently yeah um jonathan mcdowell said an interesting thing he
01:00:34
said i think it's a false choice i think a lot of the reason that we don't have sort of fiber and other
01:00:39
non-satellite-based internet in a lot of places is regulatory and not technical because yes 40 of the world doesn't have
01:00:46
internet right now but then can't we just give them internet the way we've
01:00:51
always given everybody internet like i can kind of see how that like there
01:00:56
are places where it's just hard to get the infrastructure there but then at the same time can the like some of those places afford
01:01:03
like so yeah satellite stuff so if they're charging like you said that kind of money for it currently it's also i
01:01:10
think it's just a monetary problem it's like it's not profitable to bring here to these regions right now right and
01:01:17
until it is like the satellite seemed like a good thing but also
01:01:23
but that's also extremely expensive and is that going to be profitable well they just think that they can get enough up
01:01:28
they can make it cheap enough to launch these into space and deploy enough of them that it'll eventually be and the
01:01:34
cost has gone down for them significantly even over the period of time they put it up but i think that's um everyone that i
01:01:41
asked like why wasn't this a thing before right because hughes net like we said was the thing before with the
01:01:46
geo um geocentric orbit geosynchronous orbit yeah
01:01:51
there's only a couple companies that were doing it back then which is weird to me and like a lot of them have sort of gotten out of style
01:01:57
and most of the people i've talked to were like it's a it's a cost thing it just like they realized it was not really profitable but when you have a
01:02:04
billionaire space race with a few companies that have too much money and they don't know what to do with it
01:02:10
that's when you start investing in the things that are inaccessible right now for ninety
01:02:15
percent of companies that you can eventually become profitable right they're the only ones that can do this
01:02:21
and this is the only time in history where you have this much money in the hands of these few companies
01:02:27
so it just becomes this thing another woman that we talked to
01:02:33
named robin who was uh also part of that aerospace.org website she told us there's this
01:02:39
registration convention as well there are a couple things that are already in place that have been there for a really
01:02:44
long time so although the outer space treaty is kind of the number one most talked about space treaty there is
01:02:51
actually a couple others that were negotiated in the in the 60s and 70s and so one of them is the registration
01:02:57
convention and so that that one has a lot of countries signed on including the united states and that means that
01:03:04
countries will register their space objects with the united nations and say
01:03:09
here's you know some basic features of the satellite what it's doing where it's going um you know whether or not that
01:03:15
treaty is fully implemented and whether countries are being super timely on when they send in their data and how much
01:03:22
data they send that's you know up for debate um but they also have lots of
01:03:28
both governmental and non-governmental organizations that track space objects
01:03:33
as well countries do need to register satellites with their like trajectory angle
01:03:38
direction that everybody is kind of proposing it hasn't really happened yet like a ledger yeah it's like a ledger
01:03:44
and actually a public legend like almost like a whole equator yeah they they wanted to create this
01:03:50
themselves and i think um jeremy was working on something like this with somebody else where they wanted to create sort of like a public ledger
01:03:56
situation i don't know if it would run on the blockchain seems like it would be a good use of the blockchain uh decentralized yeah log
01:04:05
i mean not that anybody would want to incorrectly input their satellite's direction and velocity well it could be a
01:04:11
malicious thing i guess yeah and with every system somebody wants to take advantage of some evil doctor genius
01:04:18
could mess up the ledger and then create kessler syndrome and destroy the planet if they wanted to it's gonna be a movie
01:04:24
on the blockchain you can't do that yeah so bitcoin um
01:04:29
so what's the ethereum of satellites just kidding don't answer that um so i i
01:04:34
wanted to ask jonathan like what's the worst case in the future here and what's the best case that potentially happens
01:04:41
right he says worst case nothing happens until something there's some disaster and then
01:04:47
people go oh i suppose we should actually fix this and it's too little too late
01:04:53
but that's the way humans do things depressing i know but but i i just
01:04:58
looking at the history of of all of these issues it's hard to draw any other conclusion
01:05:05
and so the best case scenario is you have an international system in which we keep track of and manage
01:05:11
space as a resource and make sure and you know provide the opportunity for
01:05:17
companies to do profitable things but constrained by
01:05:23
uh um paying for the externalities right paying for the ways in which these
01:05:30
satellites affect the environment and constraining how many satellites you can have without you know causing problems
01:05:37
and so i think we'll have we eventually have to evolve towards the system of that kind and the question is how long
01:05:44
does it take us to get there and how bad does it get in the meantime yeah i feel like i kind of have slight adjustments
01:05:50
to both of those yeah i'm not i'm not the expert at all but on the the first one which was
01:05:57
nothing happens until disaster yeah we have this thing now where we like name every disaster as it rolls through
01:06:04
the country and it's it doesn't really seem to change anything so maybe it would have to be like a super huge
01:06:09
disaster right but the second part was um remind me the second part again because the second
01:06:15
part was the best case scenarios where we have an international system where we manage like a blockchain yeah yeah
01:06:21
that's that kind of comes back to the self-regulating thing again yeah if all these countries or these companies are
01:06:28
following the regulation imposed by the countries they're in yeah their gut reaction is to get out of that country
01:06:34
and do that business somewhere else without the regulation so they can do what they really want to do right i'm not the expert but that's just what
01:06:41
i read into when i hear you know so we're going to set up the best case for you has some worst
01:06:47
case implications yes it's kind of like the ireland tax law thing yeah yeah yeah
01:06:53
yeah what's that that's like where a lot of uh companies are actually headquartered in ireland no like
01:06:58
federal attacks yeah apple gets a lot of flack for this all the time because they don't have to
01:07:04
like pay certain types of taxes because they're technically headquartered in ireland oh is that like libya or
01:07:09
something it's just a small number of countries that have this particular rule where it's
01:07:14
like just like encouraging for oh yes this is great for businesses but also now it's like a money shelter it's like
01:07:20
delaware like a lot of companies will do that for delaware too because they technically headquartered so i really wanted to interrupt to save you guys
01:07:26
mentioned blockchain one more time i'm turning this whole thing off your mics are off now
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dot-com wait form so i guess i wanted to sort of end this with like um a conversation uh
01:08:49
about do we think that this is worth it um how do we think this is gonna go down
01:08:55
i asked a few people like what can people do i wanted to figure out like what can people do to
01:09:00
try to positively you know make positive change right um
01:09:06
because these this is going to happen whether or not we want it to what can people do to really like make this nice i mean i got a lot of
01:09:13
different answers somebody said like go outside and enjoy the stars while you can and i was just like geez
01:09:20
gosh yes but also ouch yeah i don't have an answer but i do have a
01:09:26
way of thinking about it which is a lot of the stuff we do here is like
01:09:31
we're looking at products and like the final product is it a good or a bad final product and usually that's where
01:09:37
my analysis ends yeah but there are some cases where the
01:09:42
background noise that goes into creating the product is so strong that you have to consider that too one of them that we
01:09:49
talked about briefly was 5g like i talk a lot about the final product of millimeter wave 5g of like it doesn't
01:09:56
seem worth it you can't get your signal everywhere like this is a difficult thing
01:10:01
to build up quickly and it doesn't seem like it holds signal around a corner like that's the product analysis but
01:10:07
then the background analysis is like all the infrastructure all the like building you have to do and all the
01:10:12
regulation and like having this thing on every street corner and this kind of falls in the same vein it's like start
01:10:18
like yeah i'd like to have gigabit everywhere that sounds like a great product if it works you mentioned you've never seen 10
01:10:23
millisecond ping on a game what if you could everywhere that would be amazing
01:10:28
it's obviously very difficult but the background noise to making that happen is like literally like
01:10:34
filling the atmosphere with tens of thousands of satellites and possibly never seeing the stars the same way
01:10:40
again that's that's like leaving the orbit of the earth i'm still surprised that yeah that too elon and starlink is
01:10:46
potentially doing something yeah our atmosphere is so bad and is also somebody who wants to colonize mars so
01:10:53
badly i mean ultimately that's after something bad happens but it sounds like if something bad happens it spirals and
01:10:59
it's also his thinking could be very like self-centric where he's not thinking about the i mean he's that probably
01:11:06
thought about all of this i'm sure but like just the exponential growth of all the other companies plus all the
01:11:12
other countries with a bunch of different companies within them versus just starlink right because orbit's big
01:11:18
enough that you could send up 42 000 and yes it would outnumber the amount of visible stars but we can still at least get stuff into space and all the
01:11:24
starlinks are one system they're all talking to each other but once you get satellites from other companies they're
01:11:30
not talking to each other it's yeah there's some correlations with our i mean yeah it's naive to think if you do something like that it's not going other
01:11:37
people aren't going to want to do that so like it's going to happen the nature of capitalism is that there's going to be more and everyone's going to try to
01:11:44
be doing better and more than yeah so each other if he's the one that wants exponential growth thing yeah he's the
01:11:50
one starting the ball rolling though and starting that going so that's why it's kind of weird to me that it's like a
01:11:55
weird game of space monopoly yeah like if every if every car on the road
01:12:00
was made by the same car manufacturer they could all talk to each other and nobody would ever crash yeah but that's a monopoly you can't
01:12:07
have that sort of lack of competition no i'm just giving the one upside because every company wants to be monopoly no no
01:12:13
yeah but yeah so now you look at like okay if every satellite in space was talking to each other that would be
01:12:18
pretty good right but that's kind of impossible the competition yeah that's required here's a here's another image um from
01:12:24
2019 showing a bunch of starling satellites flying through this giant image screen yeah there's what there's
01:12:31
got to be like 10 to 15 lines just going straight through that looks like if you gave a four-year-old a crayon in a
01:12:36
construction site like you could paint the wall as much as you want but it'll never look as good as you want with that
01:12:42
four-year-old with crayon in there yeah wow so and again this is from two years ago and it's uh only a fraction of what
01:12:49
we're gonna have i i think like going through this episode it sounds bad but my outlook on all of this has
01:12:55
gotten grimmer and grimmer yeah the minutes have gone by well there was one
01:13:00
guy we spoke to dr joseph kohler collar i believe and his outlook was more
01:13:07
positive towards regulation being coming from the companies themselves space
01:13:12
companies are a different different type of companies in the sense that it's very
01:13:17
very capital intensive now that being said i think that gives us some time from a regulatory
01:13:23
perspective to to understand um what the projections are what the
01:13:28
forecasts are what the type of satellite or constellations those companies are proposing to start working with those
01:13:35
companies recognizing that there is a need uh recognizing there is a common benefit um but also recognizing there's common
01:13:41
risk and starting to work with those companies and developing the right the right rules of the world and the right
01:13:47
best practices so he was kind of saying that because of the monetary incentive that everyone has
01:13:52
and it's in every company's best interest to not crash into another company that the regulation is going to
01:13:57
come from the bottom up from the companies into government how do you guys feel about that i don't think it's
01:14:03
it's very optimistic it's super especially early but it eventually becomes a numbers game and we see every
01:14:09
company i mean every single company does things that take losses at some point and like that is something that's going
01:14:15
to happen and like how catastrophic is that to to other things like as long as it's not
01:14:21
catastrophic to their business they don't care yeah and i don't know if i trust yeah for the rest of civilization
01:14:29
i was trying to draw an analogy of like companies self-limiting themselves in order to not crash into others but it's
01:14:35
just like i don't really see that in any other industry so yeah it would be very optimistic for
01:14:41
this to be the first industry where companies are like you know what for the better of the planet let's not do so much yeah to go into zero regulations
01:14:48
and think that right like we have companies that are going into regulations and still like not sell
01:14:53
policing themselves so it's great with draw i know it's a very like sad
01:14:58
outlook but it's like if you don't do something someone else will if it is profitable and if it will get them ahead
01:15:03
of other people and that's just the way the world operates and so i think that's why a lot of these astronomers are just
01:15:09
they they're just convinced it's like this is happening yeah i mean who could like i can't even think of how to get
01:15:14
around it potentially yeah and start regulations i know it's like it be that's the thing is like the un vice
01:15:21
president the un's the group that had the space
01:15:27
treaty but um it wasn't every country that signed on to it a lot of countries have signed on
01:15:33
but not ratified which apparently like signing on is technically the equivalent of ratifying but you didn't actually
01:15:39
sign the doc you didn't ratify the documents you didn't have people saying yeah we did i don't know it's confusing
01:15:44
um but that's the thing is like there's no one like president of the planet and without
01:15:51
that it's going to be really hard planet president you're on to something
01:15:57
yeah one that's what i'm suggesting yeah clearly one big game of monopoly yeah wow but on the flip side
01:16:04
everyone gets free internet how important is that yeah i don't enjoy that 10 million part in here were we
01:16:09
getting free and was it actually free and there's nothing yeah i was going to say like everyone gets it
01:16:15
that is also the other thing there is like yeah i guess it has to get cheap enough but like uh at the time it gets
01:16:22
cheap enough to hit those places that are really not able to get internet right now is there a better solution to
01:16:27
get internet to them by then it just feels like something that's super super expensive which goal is to get something
01:16:34
super super cheap to people that can't right quite afford it i mean elon's willing to throw a lot of money at this
01:16:39
problem right yeah you know because he will eventually profit a lot from it um
01:16:44
also just a quick a couple quick uh fact checks uh it was the european space agency which had to
01:16:51
take evasive action to stop its satellite from being hit with starlink uh
01:16:56
there was a one in a thousand chance it was going to get hit but that was ten times over their threshold that they
01:17:02
were willing to cross okay um the average starling satellite is 573
01:17:08
pounds and about the size of a table oh that's way smaller than i thought
01:17:14
well i don't know what a table what table they're talking about that's the thing i was doing 500 pounds is not very
01:17:20
it's smaller than that sure yeah yeah it's like a motorcycle yeah yeah but but you know there's also 60
01:17:28
you know well yeah yes still i mean 16 we're talking about tens of thousands potentially hundreds of thousands of
01:17:34
yeah i mean it's there's gonna be a lot of traffic up there yeah uh and then of course we we
01:17:40
shared that article around recently about spacex doing like ads in space with with satellites i don't really want
01:17:47
to think about that i don't see how that's possible yeah i mean if they have 42 000 they might be able to take a few
01:17:54
of them and drink your old team over the sky but anyway that's quite dystopian it's that one
01:18:00
it's kind of like the qr codes in china they put up with drones you know flying qr codes anyway that's
01:18:06
pretty off topic uh basically i want to just follow the story as it as it happens in the next
01:18:12
couple years because it's going to happen very quickly and the fact that just a year or two ago we only had about
01:18:19
um six thousand or seven thousand satellites in space and now there are twelve thousand is just kind of like
01:18:25
well 12 000 have ever been launched there's 7 000 now and they're only like 5 000 a couple
01:18:30
years ago and it's just kind of like you said that curve that exponential curve it's just doing that and i'm
01:18:36
more companies like amazon and facebook and and one web and all these companies have started saying actually we're going
01:18:42
to put a constellation of space actually we're going to do a constellation in 2019 amazon
01:18:48
said they were going to put 3236 in space and that got delayed and they're still on track to eventually
01:18:55
put them into space but now that starlink is doing 42 000 i have feelings
01:19:00
that they're um trying to up that number so so knowing everything that you guys
01:19:07
know now yeah i guess the final question would be is it worth it is it worth it to give
01:19:12
internet to everybody for a low cost and potentially lose some of our astronomy some of the night sky
01:19:20
as uh as someone in the very privileged position of having access to internet everywhere i go
01:19:26
i don't need more satellites but that will not be everyone's position and you have to think about the again
01:19:32
i'm mostly in the business of thinking about the final product and how it affects the person and i think there's a lot of people who
01:19:38
would love the idea of wow i live in you know where'd we just drive we had no internet for like half of the trip we
01:19:44
just did for a thousand miles it'll be really nice to just have internet all the time up here in lake placid in the forest when i go camping or something
01:19:51
and uh i think a lot of people would probably say it's worth it and they don't really care about the astronomy or
01:19:57
the meteors not being seen at dawn or just getting hit by a giant like all right that's the sacrifice
01:20:02
they're willing to make um but from where i sit i think i'm good yeah
01:20:08
i think that's a good way of putting it i i do like if our entire world had high-speed internet i think we'd
01:20:14
function just as a society much better because there's all these different societies
01:20:20
remote islands and places that are just like super remote that can't get it and just like if places like that or you
01:20:26
know poorer countries that if they had it it would benefit them immensely and if it were just to take away the fact
01:20:33
that we can't take pictures in space um then i yeah then i think it's for the better but i think if we're doing this
01:20:39
ultimate aspect of like potentially stuff falling from the sky out of
01:20:44
nowhere or like limiting ourselves and destroying our atmosphere like it gets way tougher yeah to say that
01:20:51
marquez looks like he has i just had a random like light bulb moment oh airplane wi-fi does it get better with
01:20:58
starlight probably like screw the astronomers you know
01:21:04
put them up you'd probably get better wi-fi on the airplane than you would on earth because of that inverse square law
01:21:10
oh i'm in you've swayed me sorry john you've swayed me sorry mr mcdowell uh
01:21:18
no that's that's fascinating yeah i mean um i guess one one kind of counterpoint
01:21:23
is you know these areas that the 40 of the world that doesn't have internet like the the like
01:21:29
rapid change of life and change of quality of life and like movement from being like
01:21:36
third world to second world the first world country that you get from transfer of information like
01:21:42
like from my from my like classes in college just like researching all the different
01:21:49
changes in the speed in which we transfer information and how quickly society developed because of these like
01:21:56
exponentially faster ways of transferring information like information is everything it went from you know stone tablets to horse and
01:22:03
buggy to the post to email was the biggest freaking change in
01:22:09
the way that the the business and the world operated yeah and then we have way
01:22:14
to ignore the printing press yeah you know books forget about that forgot about the book part yeah the
01:22:20
wheel the wheel but yeah it's just it's it's just these these areas could go from
01:22:26
being extremely remote to like participating in the global economy yeah and that's forty percent it's a very big
01:22:33
portion you know right now obviously they can't afford it but um eventually if it gets cheap enough that they can like that could really change the way
01:22:39
the world works and i've definitely heard from some people that say like you know
01:22:44
can i say screw on a podcast uh screw trying to colonize mars we should
01:22:50
be taking care of our the planet we have you know and uh you know i think there are multiple sides to that obviously we
01:22:57
know that our planet is eventually going to become uninhabitable but that's my favorite neil degrasse tyson anecdote
01:23:03
yeah when he's like all right so i heard that in order to populate mars you first need to
01:23:09
terraform it so you drop nukes on the poles and you've like you know you re you
01:23:14
restructure the whole planet in the atmosphere and everything and that's going to take billions of dollars in like all these years
01:23:21
but we also already have earth and that's in pretty good shape we could probably do a little bit better and a
01:23:28
little bit cheaper if we just fix up the one we have here yeah right um i feel like i'm on that team yeah
01:23:34
yeah yeah yeah yeah so that's what a lot of people have been saying too and it's like if we could just really get everyone on the same page and really
01:23:40
equalize the playing field for the entire world like that would be pretty amazing as well and this is the fastest
01:23:45
possible way that that's going to happen honestly like because there's not going to be it's it's like the rest of the
01:23:51
world is speeding up exponentially well no one has even able to get the internet the long tail yeah and
01:23:57
we're going to be over here by the time they even get the internet and it's just kind of unfair and this is the way that this could happen really quickly so it's
01:24:03
you know there are positives and negatives negative big negative is when you go to lake placid to go camping uh you're
01:24:09
going to be camping under the satellites instead of stars yes there'll be waterfalls and babbling
01:24:15
brooks and lots of shooting stars all the time shooting satellites yeah yeah okay yeah
01:24:21
so that's the future we're possibly looking at sorry to bum you guys out today this is a fun episode it's funny i
01:24:26
feel like the uh the boosted episode was it was a story but it was kind of like a sad ending because the company died so
01:24:33
we're on two two sad endings in a row i don't want to pressure you into a happy ending for the next one but let's
01:24:39
let's uh i'll try to figure it out try to find like a happy story you know in the meantime let us know what you think
01:24:44
in the comments because i feel like there's going to be plenty of different opinions and different thoughts about this and also our resident armchair
01:24:50
astronomers will be coming out i'm sure you have lots of i mean you were a resident armchair astronomers today yeah yeah i put on my astronomer hat a little
01:24:56
bit there but we'll have them in the comments section below so we'll check those out too in any case this has been waveform thanks for listening thanks for
01:25:03
watching if you're on the video version and we'll catch you guys the next one peace thanks for hanging out with us
01:25:09
today and special thanks to emily zhang jonathan mcdowell jeremy tragolone reed robin dickey and
01:25:15
joseph kohler we couldn't have done this reporting without you guys waveform is produced by adam molina we are partnered
01:25:21
with the vox media podcast network and our intro outro music is by vayne sill
01:25:26
[Music]
01:25:43
you
