Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Will starlink spoil astronomy?

Episode Date: December 16, 2021

Daniel and Jorge talk about how megaconstellations of satellites might spoil our view of the Universe. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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if you're looking for a gift for yourself, for a friend, or for your family, why not get them the gift of answers about the universe? So check out our new book, frequently asked questions the universe you can find details at universef aq.com thanks for supporting the podcast happy holidays everyone hey daniel what's your favorite thing about going camping oh there's so much to love you know i really enjoy being out in nature i like taking a break from our urban routines but i guess mostly

I love being out there under the dark skies. I thought you would say s'mores, because, you know, you're smashing two kinds of candy together and you're a particle physicist. The Confection Collider, yeah, that's also delicious. No, you're right. I think, you know, being out in the night sky is amazing, right? It sort of reminds you of all the amazing stuff that's out there. Yeah, and it feels like you kind of have to get further and further away from civilization to find those really good dark skies where you can see thousands and thousands of stars. It's pretty gorgeous. How about you?

What's your favorite thing about camping other than s'mores? I like sleeping in my own bed. What? You bring your own bed camping? No, but when I go camping, it really makes me appreciate sleeping in my own bed. So, you know, overall improves my quality of life. I guess that puts that to sleep. Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.

Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor of physics at UC Irvine, and I can no longer sleep comfortably on the ground. You cannot, unlike your other physicist ancestors? Unlike 20-year-old, Daniel, who's happy to sleep on a concrete floor or the ground anywhere under the stars. I can get a good night's sleep anywhere. These days, I just need my own bed. What do you do when you go camping then? I just don't sleep very well. You don't sleep at all camping. That's why you stay up all night, watching the stars, so it all works out.

There's no point going in the tent. We're not getting any sleep anyway. So let's just stay up and eat more s'mores. Smoor the s'mores. But then do you walk to your car and sleep in your car? I just wait and sleep it all back when I get home. But welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, Explain the University production of IHeart Radio.

In which we feed you the delicious combination of knowledge and confusion smushed together into an intellectual smore. We dive into the squishy heart of everything that humanity doesn't know about this incredible universe we find ourselves in. How big it is, where it ends, when it might end, how it started, what it's all made out of, and what it all means. We surround that with delicious layers of chocolate and little bits of understanding that we have gleaned in our centuries or millennia of proving this universe and explain all of it to you. Are you especially hungry today, Daniel, or are you just looking forward to Halloween? I'm thinking about my next camping trip and how that s'm really going to get me through the night.

And which one is confusion? Is it marshmallow or chocolate? And which one is knowledge? I think confusion is definitely marshmallow because, you know, it gets pretty sticky. You can dive into the heart of it and it just sort of covers everything. And once you start asking questions, you feel like, wow, we're maybe confused about everything the same way that marshmallow never really gets off anything once it sticks to you. Right. And once it catches fire, it's all, over. Might as well throw the whole thing in the trash. I wish that confusion was as delicious toasted as marshmallows are. And what's the cracker? Is the cracker funding, I guess, to hold it all together and squeeze things out? That's right. Thank you funding agencies for being the

gram cracker in this terribly, terribly tortured analogy. Let's put that analogy to rest. Let's eat it up. But yeah, it is a big and beautiful universe that's out there. There's a lot for us to see and explore and learn from only if we can see it. And that might be. changing soon. That's right. So much about the nature of the universe comes just from information that has arrived here on Earth from the cosmos. Those brave little photons that have been flying through the universe for millions or sometimes billions of years have revealed to us the nature of things out there, the grand scope of it all, the incredible majesty of galaxies and galactic clusters, and even the Big Bang. We could learn none of that if we couldn't see out there in the

night sky. As we build better and better telescopes and new kinds of ways to observe the night sky, we learn more and more about this information that's washing over us, but only if we can still see it. Yeah, it is pretty amazing to think that we've learned so much just floating in this little rock in one corner of the galaxy, which is in one corner of the universe. You know, it's sort of like, you know, learning about the whole world by floating on a little raft in the middle of the ocean, right? Like, how much would you be able to piece together about how the whole world works? Yeah, or if you like lived in a lighthouse and never left, but you had a bunch of powerful telescopes, and all you could do was spy on people

and look out your windows. It's incredible, you're right, how much we have learned about the nature of things without going anywhere, really. I mean, we sent a few robots just around our neighborhood, but we have a pretty good sense for the shape of the galaxy and even much, much larger objects without ever having been there ourselves, of course. And all of that relies on being able to see the night sky, the fact that the universe is mostly transparent and that information can travel all the way through the cosmos and get to us. Yeah. You make it sound like science is some kind of stalker, like we're stalking the universe.

We are. Are we going to get arrested by the cosmic police? I don't know how much intellectual privacy rights the universe has. You know, I think it's signed the terms of use, and so it basically gave away all of its rights. Right, right. I mean, it's sitting out there naked, basically, right? I mean, it's not our fault that we can't look away. That's right.

We're deep inside of it. I mean, it's swallowed us, and so what can it expect, you know? Yeah. It's like that movie, inner space, you know, where they shrink down and they're flying around inside that body. In this case, I am Dennis Quaid, I guess. Somebody's got to have a chin. But yeah, it is a pretty big and wonderful universe, and it all depends on our view of it. Without our view of it, we would be able to tell very little about the universe.

Like if our planet was covered in dense clouds or if we were in a far off corner of the galaxy with nothing around us, we would be pretty ignorant about what's going on. Yeah, we are pretty lucky that the universe. universe is mostly transparent that we're not sitting inside of a huge dust cloud and that the solar wind for example is mostly invisible that that information mostly gets to us but you know what if it couldn't and you know sometimes when you're standing outside and looking up at the stars you're excited because you see stars but sometimes you see something else like maybe you see a plane go by or even more exciting you see this space station go by or some really high up satellite float by that also feels exciting sometimes oh yeah yeah because you're seeing like a bit of human

technology. You're like, wow, look, we are out there in space. That's cool. But also, there's another side of that. Yeah, leave it to humans to ruin everything, basically, as usual. Even the night sky, we're going to ruin that soon. That's right. Because, you know, you look at the night sky, you see one satellite go by. No big deal, right? Well, what if there are two satellites or 10 satellites or tens of thousands of satellites? It might interfere with your ability to see what's out there past our neighborhood deep, deep in the universe to answer some of our basic questions. Yeah, it'd be bad for science, but good for some fun nighttime viewing.

Then you make it sound pretty exciting to see a whole bunch of shooting stars going on at the same time. Sometimes when I'm out with my kids, they're more excited to see satellites than to see stars. Because, you know, the stars just sort of sit there. And the satellites are like, look, that one's moving or blinking or doing something. So I get it why they're more exciting. But, you know, the real deep mysteries of the universe, of course, are contained in the light from stars and other crazy things.

And secretly, you're hoping maybe that is the UFO that we've been waiting for. That's right. I've been signaling them desperately with my campfire. Why can't anybody see that? Yeah, what are you doing? Sending smoke signals to the aliens. But, yeah, it does seem to be an increasing problem, this idea that there are more and more space, man-made space objects out in the night sky.

And so today on the program, we'll be asking the question. How will Starlink affect astronomy? Wow. It seems like astronomy can be spoiled. It can be spoiled. It's sort of delicate. And this is something we went through years ago when we had this invention of LED lights,

which made lighting much brighter and more efficient and cheaper. And then people started installing LED lights everywhere. and all of a sudden there was a lot more light pollution than there was before. And, you know, if there's lights nearby, then it makes it harder to observe the night sky. And astronomers spoke up and they were like, hey, could we get some like shielding on those lights or could we limit them to one frequency? And we were able to adjust and to redesign those lights so they mostly pointed down. They were mostly yellow instead of being broad-pant and white.

And we were able to sort of save astronomy. But this isn't the first time that, you know, consumer technology has sort of stumbled into the otherwise pristine night sky and almost munged it up. Wow. I didn't know that. So as humans, our civilization has gone brighter and brighter at night? Oh, yes. If you went back to the 1500s, for example, it wouldn't be that hard to find a dark night sky. Like, our cities are much, much brighter than they were hundreds of years ago or even 100 years ago or 50 years ago. And that just has to do with access to power and the cheapness and the brightness of our light sources. So this idea that Starlink might affect astronomy, Starlink is some sort of satellite plan, right?

When you think of a satellite, you probably think of like a single object, you know, a big piece of technology floating in space. But there's this new idea to launch constellations of satellites that have hundreds, sometimes even thousands of little parts that are floating out there in space. And so this is sort of a brand new idea and people are excited about for all sorts of applications. but it has downsides and astronomers are very concerned that the night sky might just be filled with satellites in the future making it maybe impossible

to learn secrets of the universe. Oh man, it's like you're blocking the view, get out of the way. Exactly. This is something that's for all humanity that all humans have enjoyed looking up at the night sky. And as we develop our technology,

we need to make sure that we're approaching this in a sensible way and that we have like regulations and rules in place so that individuals can't spoil it for the whole species. Humans. This is why we can't have nice things.

Or no nice things either. But yeah, we were wondering how many people out there knew this idea of giant mega satellite constellations, otherwise known as Starlink, is one name for it. And so we were wondering

how many people knew about them and how they might affect astronomy. So Daniel went out there into the internet to ask people this question. So thanks to everybody who's willing to participate for those of you

who've been listening to the podcast for years, but never phoned it. and please feel welcome, no pressure, of course, but we'd like to hear your voice on the podcast. So please, write to me to Questions at Danielanhorpe.com. Think about it for a second. What do you think putting thousands of satellites up into the sky

will do to astronomy? Here's what people had to say. Most likely if they will pass in the field of view of a telescope, it will have to affect with something. I believe that the Starlink project will affect astronomy. by completely changing our visual perspective on space. It's going to add man-made light pollution, and we're going to need to remap what we can visually see from Earth

into outer space. Starlink is a program from SpaceX to launch a lot of internet satellites, which I think we already know that it's going to make it a lot harder to study stars and stuff. poorly. I saw a train of 29 Starlink satellites the other night, and I can't imagine if my telescope were aimed directly in that line. I think there's a lot of worry about how many satellites they want to put up, and how it totally tips the scales in terms of space debris. It might be a point we can never come back from.

Starlink has thousands of small satellites all giving off radio waves, so they might interfere with ground-based observations, perhaps creating the need for more space telescopes. All right. Not a good outlook here for astronomy. That's right, but this is something people are definitely aware of, right? This is not a situation where people have no idea what we're talking about. This has definitely been in the public conversation. Yeah, interesting. Yeah, nobody here said, what is Starlink? Which is honestly what my answer would have been.

It's kind of a new idea, and I know it's been debated a lot because people like Elon Musk, are into it or are applying for it in Amazon as well. So maybe step us through this, Daniel. What is Starlink? And what is a mega constellation of satellites? Starlink is an example of mega constellations where instead of having one or two or maybe even 10, like a small number of very specialized, very expensive satellites, instead you mass produce a bunch of smaller satellites so that it's cheaper.

So you take advantage of the economy of scale. And instead of having just a few up there, you launch thousands. or tens of thousands. And one application of this is, for example, to provide internet coverage. There are lots of places in the world, especially poor areas and rural areas, where it's just not economically feasible or commercially attractive to run fiber optics or even copper cables to all of the homes. And so to get internet coverage to those folks, it's attractive to build a satellite internet

system where the information gets beam to space and then down to a dish on your house. Wow. So you would be signing up for space. internet, not just internet, but like space internet. Yeah, space internet, exactly. And just like you get satellite TV, but that's one directional, right? You were getting information beamed down to you from a satellite. This is two directional.

You download a picture on Facebook and it goes to a satellite and down to your house, and you write a comment on that picture. It goes back up to the satellite and then back down to your internet service provider. And so this is two-way communication with a satellite in order to get internet. Wow, so your selfie would go out into space and back, and maybe back again, right? It would bounce around in everything space. That's right, and it doesn't only just hit the satellite, right? Your beam is sort of broad, so the satellite picks it up, but it also goes past the satellite out into deep space.

So any selfie you send via satellite internet is also going to the aliens. So think about that, and next time you send a, you know, racy photo to your friends via satellite internet. You're speaking for the whole human race there, people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Please make it look good. But I guess one question is, like, you know, we have cell phone towers. Are you saying, like, we don't have cell phone coverage everywhere? It sort of seems like we have a lot of cell phone coverage.

That's true. We do have pretty good coverage, at least in the U.S., and in a lot of the Western world, for cell phone towers. This is sort of an alternative approach. I think there are lots of places where we don't have coverage. And so this would give you, you know, Internet access rather than just cellular service. All right. So then you said there are small satellites.

How small are we talking about? Is it like a launch box size, like a palm size? How big are these satellites? I think they're about the size of a bed, for example, like a mattress. But they're pretty small. You know, they're like 500 pounds or 250 kilos each. And the idea is not just that you could mass produce them, but that they could fly in low Earth orbit. You know, one issue with satellite internet is the latency.

Most of the satellite internet systems that we have right now are in geosynchronous orbit. So single satellite is really far up there. but it sort of floats over the same patch of Earth all the time. And so it's sort of like always there in the sky above you. But they're far away. Like geosynchronous orbit means you're like 35,000 kilometers up there. And it takes a little while for the light to go all the way up to the satellite and back. If instead you had satellites in low Earth orbit, like 500 kilometers, it'd be much faster.

But the problem is that it's very complicated to have them be geosynchronous. And so essentially what you need, instead of having a few satellites that are fixed, you need like a big constellation of satellites so they can pass the signals back and forth to each other. You have like a whole network of satellites up there in space. So geosynchronous means like it's always above the same spot on Earth all the time. But with these, because they're lower in orbit, they would be basically flying around all the time.

That's right. A single one would be passing over the Earth. They do an orbit in around 90 minutes. And so if you have like a 90-minute internet session, you're not always talking to the same satellite. You're getting passed from satellite to satellite. And so to have full coverage, you need a lot of these satellites. Also, each one, because it's lowered down, can't see as much of the Earth.

It has like a smaller patch that it covers. So you need more of them in order to cover the whole Earth. I didn't know they were so big, as big as mattress. Does that mean that you would have a mattress ready when you go space camping? I don't know how comfortable they are. The good thing in space is they don't need to be that comfortable. So this is like a real thing, right? Like people are planning to make these mattressized and thousands of these satellites and launch them into space soon, right?

Oh, it's a real thing. It's already up there. They launched the first ones in 2019. And so currently they have 1,600 of these satellites already up there flying, delivering satellite internet. The beta service is available in a bunch of countries. But, you know, there are plans for a lot more. And we've already seen some of the sort of negative effects of them. And people are worried about what happens if this goes big.

Like we have 1,600 satellites now, but Starlink is approved to have 12,000 satellites up there, and they plan to go for 30,000 satellites. And that's just one company, right? Or like one conglomerate that's doing it. Other companies have other plans. That's right. As usual, Jeff Bezos has his own plan for an Amazon-based one called OneWeb. And so, you know, people project that we could have like 100,000 of these microsatellites up in low Earth orbit by the end of the decade.

And people are wondering, like, what will the night sky look like if it's filled with these satellites? Wow, it could look like basically like a disco, like you're in a nightclub with all these lights moving, flashing around everywhere. Exactly. And if you want to see out past low Earth orbit deep into the cosmos to learn the secrets of nature, that could be a problem. Yeah, it might actually block astronomy and our search for answers in the universe. So let's get into that. But first, let's take a quick break. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills, and I get eye rolling from teachers

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because the future belongs to all of us. So listen to There Are No Girls on the Internet on the IHurt Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're talking about mega constellations of satellites. So humans, as always, have to ruin everything. So we're going to ruin the night sky now.

And we're going to put up all these thousands and thousands of satellites out in low-earth orbit to give people better access to the internet. I guess it's sort of a trade-off here, right? That's right. You know, there are definitely positives, and with every technology, there are unintended consequences.

But it is important to bring internet access to everybody. You know, there are lots of folks out there that just cannot get reliable internet. And it's important. It's a part of being part of the modern world. And, you know, for safety issues, if you're out in the wilderness, to get internet, for rescue.

So there's a lot of it. is to having accessible internet. Like if you're in the middle of the ocean, that would be hard to have a Zoom call. That's right. Or, you know, order your Amazon Prime. You know, I need some fresh water. Can you deliver it, please?

And then it gets deployed from a drone in space. Is that the idea? Is that the ultimate goal? I'm sure there's a committee at Amazon working on that exact thing. Yeah, so it's a big equity issue to give every human sort of access to all of the knowledge

and all of the data and all of the news that's happening in the world right now. So then nobody gets left. behind. But unfortunately, it might have some negative consequences for science, specifically astronomy, because astronomy depends on looking at the night sky. And so if there's a bunch of satellites flying in front of you, it's going to be hard to do that. Yeah, and we've already seen this happen. Astronomers see these satellites crossing the path of their telescopes. We've

always had satellites up there. But if we're going to rapidly increase the number of satellites, then it's going to become a bigger and bigger problem. And so you see all these examples on the internet of beautiful satellite pictures of deep space and then there's just these like streaks of satellites in a straight line going across it spoiling the view it's like photo bombing exactly satellite bombing the pictures and these things can be much more reflective than the other satellites because they're in lower earth orbit right so they're much closer does that make them brighter or just you know just more annoying yeah it makes them brighter but mostly it's an issue of the number these things are eventually going to outshine all the stars in the sky.

Yeah, because I guess these satellites, they don't actually glow. It's not like they have a flashlight pointed at the earth. It's just that they don't have any sort of like beacon or anything, but we can see them because they're reflecting the light from the sun. Things out in space, it's a little counterintuitive, struggle to stay cool, right? In space, it's very important that you don't overheat and like fry your electronics. And you might think, oh, well, space is super cold, right? That's true, but also space is a vacuum.

And vacuum is an insulator. So it's actually harder sometimes to get rid of your heat in space because you're not surrounded by air that can suck that heat away. There's no like wind in space to steal your heat. And so you need to stay cold. And one way to stay cold to your electronics work is to be reflective rather than absorptive. So they design these things to reflect sunlight rather than absorb it. And so basically they act almost like mirrors.

You know, there's parts of these satellites that are very reflective. And when the sun shines on them, they light up just like the moon does. Interesting. Is that why you always see satellites and spacecraft sort of like wrapped in an aluminum foil? Is that the reason? That's one reason, yeah. There's lots of reasons you want to protect it also from other kinds of radiation that can be stopped by foil. But in general, you want your stuff to be reflective in order to stay cool.

Except for the solar panels, the solar panels are black because you want them to absorb all the light. But even like the other side of the solar panels tend to be bright so that they can reflect away in the unwanted heat. I thought maybe just Tupperware technology hadn't made it to satellites yet. But yeah, so the main problem is that they have to be reflecting and they reflect light and that's going to pollute our view of the universe. Yeah, and it's especially bad. It's sort of sunrise and sunset because of the angle of the satellites. When the sun goes down and the satellites are sort of just over the horizon,

then the sun hits them and goes right towards your eyes. And so in the deep, deep part of the night, when our part of the earth is in shadow, So it's not as bad a problem. They're sort of fewer of these satellites can sort of see the sun and see where you are. But it's very bad at twilight and also at dawn, which is where a lot of really important observing happens. Interesting. But couldn't they, like, aren't solar panels dark?

Couldn't they just wrap them in solar panels? And that would make them both dark and, you know, getting more energy for their operation? Solar panels are dark, absolutely. But you can't have the whole thing wrapped in solar panels. you need part of it to have antennas, right? You need to be able to communicate with it. And it's actually those antennas that are the brightest parts of them

that are really the most reflective. They have these antenna arrays to communicate with ground stations on Earth. That's the point of the satellite. And then they have these other little parabolic antennas so they can talk to each other. And so they're just sort of functional parts of the satellite. You know, we'll talk later about things

they can do to mitigate the reflectivity of these satellites. But you can't just have it all be one big solar panel. Well, it sounds pretty serious. I mean, you said as soon there will be as many satellites as there are visible stars in the night sky. It's like when you look out, most of the things you'll see are satellites. Yeah, and I think people will also be surprised to realize how few stars you can see in the night sky. When you look up in the night sky, even in the darkest, darkest nights in the depths of the woods, you only really see like 5,000, maybe 10,000 stars.

It seems like an overwhelming number. It's really not that big. And then when you go into the cities, really, it's just down to a few hundreds. or even dozens if you're in a bright city. Or one in Los Angeles, yes. Yeah, you can see any at all. And so at some point, if we have thousands of satellites up there, then they really are going to rival the number of stars that you can see.

And it's bad for people who enjoy seeing the sky. It's bad for, you know, cultures for whom stars are an important part of their storytelling or their history. But it's also really bad for astronomers who are very, very sensitive to small amounts of light. We have, for example, surveys that are scanning the sky constantly looking for changes. What's changing in the night sky? Our stars getting brighter and dimmer.

Our scars disappearing. These are very important for understanding the dynamics of the universe and it's much harder to do if things are changing because satellites are whizzing in front of you all of the time. I guess is that mostly the problem is the photo bombing? It's like seeing things that you think is a star but is not actually a star. Is that the main problem? Or does it actually sort of affect the measurement of regular.

It's both. And in one hand, it blocks things, right? If there's a satellite there, you can't see behind it. But also it affects the rest of the image. Satellite imaging is very sensitive and it's adaptive. And so if you have a very bright source, it can sort of saturate it. It changes the whole range. It's like when you take a picture with your camera, if something is back lit, if the sun is behind you, then you really can't see the person. And that's because your camera is adjusted because it wants to get all the different range, the brightest and the darkest. And so then the darkest things don't come. come out very well. So it's sort of like if somebody's shining a flashlight in your face, right, then you can't see the night sky at all. And so that's a difficulty for astronomical technology. And also astronomical images don't use CMOS technology like in your phones. They use something else called a CCD, which is much more sensitive to very small amounts of light. But it also has a disadvantage in that, you know, all the pixels in a row are sort of linked together. CCD stands for a charge couple device and it reads it out by. passing the information down the line.

The short version of the story is, if you overwhelm a single pixel, it can cause blooming, which lights up an entire strip of pixels. And so it doesn't just overwhelm the part of the image you're in, it can also ruin the rest of the image. Yeah, because, you know, I was thinking, like, if we know where all the satellites are,

even if there are in the thousands, you could still have them in a database so you could maybe account for them when you're doing astronomy. But you're saying it's just like it just causes general light pollution and it oversaturates all of our sensors. Yeah, and they've done some studies.

You know, they're not just whining about it. The astronomy community has gotten together a couple of times and put out these careful reports analyzing the impact of these mega constellations, both the ones we have now and the ones that are planned in the future. And they anticipate that it could ruin like 30 to 40% of all astronomical exposures. That's like a huge amount. Oh, my God. That's huge.

That's a lot of science. That's a lot of science. Imagine that you're some young astronomer and you've just gotten time on a very important ground-based telescope and it's ruined, you know. You already have to gamble with the clouds, and now you have to gamble with the clouds and Elon Musk's space toys. And Jeff Bezos, space mattresses, yeah.

It's not just signs that's being affected. I mean, more concerning is that it might, like, affect the safety of the human race. Yeah, we're talking about putting a lot of objects up there in orbit, and we already have kind of a lot of stuff out there. I mean, there are already like 4,000 or so satellites in low Earth orbit.

and many more in other orbits. And not all of these things are operational anymore, right? Not like everything we build works forever. So we have a whole episode about this. It's called space junk, just like bits of rocket or broken satellites that are just sort of floating out there in space, cluttering things up. And there's a real danger that if you get too many of these things, they could just like crash into each other and fill space with debris,

making it like unpassable. Right. And it's like debris going at the, 30,000 miles per hour, right? Yeah, it's very fast-moving stuff. And because it's very fast-moving, it can lead to this sort of cascade effect. Like two things collide,

and they create like thousands or even tens of thousands of high-speed bits of debris which collide with other things. And then pretty soon, all of space is just filled with garbage. It's like if one person slams on their brakes on the freeway,

very high speed, that causes an accident, and then you can get like a thousand car pile up, right? Wow, yeah. So if you put like tens of thousands of satellites up there and they all crash into each other in a chain reaction, then we could basically cover the whole Earth in like junk. Yeah, and not just cover the Earth.

Like it's not such a problem if they fall out of orbit. That's actually okay because when they go into the atmosphere, they tend to burn up and they don't hit the surface. So it's not really a danger to humanity. But if they're still floating up there, that's the real problem. Because if low Earth orbit is filled with junk, it makes it impossible to send a, rocket up there because it's just going to get pelted, right? It's like we have a force field that's

the opposite direction that prevents us from leaving. It's like we built a prison and trapped ourselves inside of it. Wow. That would be so tragic and ironic for the human race. It would be. And so you need to be really careful. And currently, there's a whole office where people monitor satellite near misses and try to get them to avoid each other and they like fire their rockets to move higher or lower out of each other's way. But that gets exponentially more. complicated as you get more satellites. And so now we're talking about like 100,000 more satellites up there. It just seemed almost inevitable that something's going to go wrong.

Yeah. Well, obviously the solution is to make them out of mattresses and not just the size of mattresses. And so then they'll just bounce off each other. That's right. Well, let's just make them out of marshmallows, right? Yeah, perfect. Because then they get toasted as they come into the atmosphere.

Well, yeah, it's going to start making them catch on fire. Sun-toasted space marshmallows. I mean, who doesn't want one of those? Then you're on a camping trip, you just hold out your cracker and marshmallows land right on it. Yeah, there you go. Well, they make it through the atmosphere. And, you know, I was joking about how they burn up

when they enter the atmosphere. And that's good because we don't want them to, like, hit buildings or smash on people. But there's another factor there, which is that these satellites have a bunch of heavy metals in them. And so if you have a lot of them and they're burning up when they enter the atmosphere, you're sort of polluting the upper atmosphere

with a bunch of heavy metals. And we don't really know, what that means. Like, if you inject a huge amount of aluminum, even in vapor form, into the upper atmosphere, what happens? It's like a geoengineering experiment. Wow. It's like wrapping the earth in aluminum foil. Yeah, or something else, right? Like, there's this project where they injected the upper atmosphere with all of these copper needles to see if it would change the weather. And, you know, that didn't go very well. And so who knows what would happen? Even if you managed to get the broken satellites to de-orbit to sort of fall into the atmosphere and burn up, then who knows

what would happen if you pollute the upper atmosphere with all this aluminum and other heavy metals. It is the final frontier space for human pollution. It might not just have our ability to travel into space safely, but it might actually affect our ability to see things coming at us that might kill us. One of the fields of astronomy that would be most dramatically affected are the people who look for near-Earth objects. So if you are on the lookout, a rock that's heading towards the earth that might, for example, kill us all, then you can only spot it when it reflects sunlight, right? These rocks are not glowing like stars. And so we look for these things and we look for the right moment when they shine their light at us. And sometimes

these things, if they're near the sun or coming from the direction of the sun, they can be very hard to spot because of the sun. And so just after the sun dips over the horizon, it's the best time to see these things. But if space is filled with a bunch of reflective stuff, which is also shining back at you at the same moment, these twilight and dawn moments, then we're basically blind in those directions. And it might be impossible to see something coming at us. Wow. Yeah, it'd be like a lot of noise, right? Like false 911 calls or something. Like if everyone called 911 to prank them, then you might miss the really important calls, right? Yeah, exactly. Or it's like in Top Gun, you know, when every fighter just looking to like,

come out of the sun because it's a blind spot for the other pilots. That's our blind spot. And so if we can no longer look near the sun, then it becomes an even bigger blind spot. And that's pretty dangerous. Like super dangerous, right? It might mean the end of the human race if we don't catch that asteroid. And I don't know how you feel about it, but I think that's kind of a big deal. It's a bigger deal than it's more for sure. And it's not just astronomers enjoying the night sky and, you know, other cultures who use it for storytelling and avoiding all. all of this pollution of the upper atmosphere, it's in general just sort of brightening the night sky.

Even if you're not like training a telescope on one particular spot to see a galaxy, in general, it's just gonna sort of like brighten everything. So like the overall brightness of the sky will go up and that'll make it harder to see anything. You know, the reason that you see stars at night and not during the day, they're there during the day. You just don't see them because the sky is so bright.

So imagine making the whole night sky a little bit brighter, Stars and galaxies will literally disappear. I thought you were going to say it's going to make it harder to sleep at night. That's mostly just stress and anxiety. Yeah, we do need satellites for that. Exactly. We got that covered already. Yeah, and it's not just Elon Musk.

You said Amazon also has one called One Web as well. And there are other folks. And one real problem is that there are very few laws. Like there are no regulations limiting the reflectivity of satellites. So there's nothing preventing anybody from launching a bunch of these satellites. satellites and having them up there and being super duper bright. Doesn't the space force get involved at that point? You mean the Netflix show or the actual branch of the military?

I mean like the actual space force people, yeah. I think they're too busy making the uniforms look less like Nazis. All right. Well, let's get into what we could do about this light pollution, this mega constellation satellite crowding in the night sky. Is there anything we can do about it to prevent it affecting astronomy and our ability to see asteroids and our ability to really enjoy the beautiful universe

that's out there for us to see. So let's get into that. But first, let's take another quick break. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential. I was going to schools

to try to teach kids these skills and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like, it's easier to punch someone in the face. When you think about emotion regulation, like, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome as a result of it, if it's going to be beneficial to you.

Because it's easy to say, like, go you, go blank yourself, right? It's easy. It's easy to just drink the extra beer. It's easy to ignore, to suppress, seeing a colleague who's bothering you and just, like, walk the other way. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denials is easier.

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Adventure should never come with a pause button. Remember the movie pass era? Where you could watch all the movies you wanted for just $9? It made zero cents and I could not stop thinking about it. I'm Bridget Todd. host of the tech podcast, there are no girls on the internet. On this new season, I'm talking to the innovators who are left out of the tech headlines. Like the visionary behind a movie pass, black founder Stacey Spikes, who was pushed out of

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So listen to There Are No Girls on the Internet on the IHurt Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever wished for a change but weren't sure how to make it? Maybe you felt stuck in a job, a place, or even a relationship. I'm Emily Tish Sussman, and on she pivots, I dive into the inspiring pivots of women who have taken big leaps in their lives and careers. I'm Gretchen Whitmer, Jody Sweeten. Monica Patton. Elaine Welteroth. I'm Jessica Voss. And that's when I was like, I got to go. I don't know how, but that kicked off the pivot of how to make the transition. Learn how to get comfortable pivoting because your life is going to be full of them. Every episode gets real about the why behind these changes and gives

you the inspiration and maybe the push to make your next pivot. Listen to these women and more on She Pivotts, now on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. We are putting all the blame on billionaires today. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, they have plans to fill the sky with. thousands and thousands and thousands of mini satellites, which might affect our ability to look out into the universe and learn from it and also appreciate its beauty. That's right. And astronomers have come together and reached out to these companies

and tried to describe to them the impact and the importance of astronomy and preserving our dark skies. So there's been a lot of discussions, and it's not like these tech entrepreneurs are totally ignoring it. They understand. They get it. Elon Musk said, quote, I am confident that we will not cause any impact whatsoever in astronomical discoveries, zero,

and will take corrective action if it's above zero. That's not super comforting. First of all, I don't know if I take Elon Musk at this word. And second of all, what if it's too late to take corrective action, you know? Like, what if we feel space with junk and then we can't do anything about it? Is he going to personally go up there with a little broom and... Clean up his own mess? Yeah.

Yeah, clean up his own debris. I don't know, but at least it's better than if he just shrugged it off and ignored them. You know, making the right noises is better than making the wrong noises, I guess. But you're right. It's something we need to discuss now before space gets very, very filled with these constellations. Do you think it's in his budget? Like, you know, oops, I was wrong. Let's pay to clean this up.

As long as it costs less than $200 billion, then, yeah, he can afford it. Yeah, well, there you go. But they have done some things. I mean, they have been already responsive, and they are working to reduce. the impact of all of their satellites on astronomy. The first thing they did was similar to your idea, which is they just tried to make these things darker. They're like, well, let's try to make each satellite less reflective.

So they introduced a new version of their satellite called DarkSat, where they basically painted it with this anti-reflective coating. So these phased antenna arrays and the parts that communicate with the ground, instead of being very reflective, they made them dark and very absorptive. Does that help? It helps a bit. I mean, it makes them about how. half is bright, which is good.

The problem is that then the satellite doesn't really work because it absorbs too much heat, and then it can't really function as intended. And so it only half solves a problem, but it sort of breaks the satellite from the commercial aspect. So it wasn't really a workable solution. What else can they do it? Well, then they have another idea,

which is instead of painting it directly with an anti-reflective coating, they're putting like a visor on it, like a shade. And so this has the same effect. It's like a black shade, but it deploys and it's a little bit distant from the antenna, so it's not actually like heating up the antenna itself. And it just blocks the sunlight at the right moment so it doesn't reflect back onto the earth.

Like a little parasol. Yeah, like a little parasol. Or like that flap in your car, you know, you can pull down to block the sun and you put it back up when you don't need it. So this is something that can deploy just the right moment to avoid those reflections at dawn and at dusk. Interesting.

But would you point it at the sun, like to block the sun, or would you point it at the earth? so it doesn't, you know, the light doesn't go onto Earth. You'd position it between the sun and the most reflective parts of the satellite and that at such an angle that any sunlight that does hit it goes off into space rather than down to Earth. So basically redirects the sunlight so it doesn't bounce off the satellite and down to Earth. It goes out into space instead. But I imagine that's kind of expensive, right?

Because then the satellite has to be actively like moving this visor, this blocker all the time, and that costs energy. Yeah, it costs energy and it costs more money. But that seems to be something they're willing to do. They're also playing lots of games with the positioning of the satellite. Like one of the most reflective parts of the satellite is the solar array. So the satellite itself is like, you know, the size of a bed is like one meter by two meters. But then it has this solar power array, which is like 10 meters long.

And it's very reflective. And so if that solar ray is positioned in such a way that reflects back down to the Earth, it's like incredibly bright. And so they've rearranged the sort of the direction of the solar array so that it's behind the satellite. catches sun, but it's shielded from the earth by the satellite chassis itself. So that it also improves the reflectivity. Interesting. And couldn't they also like maybe angle the satellite in certain times or certain ways so that it's less reflective?

Or would that interfere with like pointing the antenna and stuff? That's a great idea and that's what they're doing there. So to try to angle the satellite so the sun comes on the knife's edge rather than on the flat part of it, sort of like on the narrow edge of the mattress. and that will also reduce the reflectivity. You know, and so they're doing what they can. I mean, one issue is that all this so far is voluntary, you know, like regulations and laws don't really keep up with technology, which can move very, very fast, especially when Elon Musk is involved.

And so the kind of thing that never really was a problem, that never really needed to be handled with legislation and regulation, all of a sudden we're like at the mercy of these billionaires because we don't have sort of rules in place. Whoa. Well, it's sort of like the open seas, right? Like nobody owns it, so nobody is regulating it. I don't actually know how that works. I think there are laws about what happens on the international oceans, but I'm definitely not an expert.

But you're right, it's a new frontier of technology. And so our existing laws, you know, even if they do cover it, they didn't anticipate this. And so they weren't really written for this in mind. People have built-in assumptions. Surely nobody's going to launch 100,000 satellites when they wrote these laws decades ago. Well, obviously, we need space rangers.

or space cowboys to put some order back into town up there. Yeah, and order is important. Another thing we can do is just know where these things are. If you're an astronomer and you know where the satellites are and when they're coming, you can try to plan your observations around it and you can remove them, you can subtract them from your images. You don't have to play guessing games like, well, was that a star that did this crazy thing

or was that Starlink's satellite number of 7,442, right? if you can know these things very precisely. Like you could program it into your telescope to take pictures when there aren't any satellites passing in that little patch of sky you're looking at. Yeah, and then also afterwards to subtract anything that happens to get in the way. But this needs some coordination.

You know, somebody has to like write the software and have a database and maintain it and update it and have it be accurate, very precise. And who's going to pay for that, right? So is that Starlink is going to do that or are the astronomer is going to have to force their grad students to write this software? It just needs some sort of organization.

And we're at this moment we're like, we've dipped our toes in the mega constellation and we're about to dump thousands and thousands more. It's the kind of thing we need to figure out before we make a big mistake. Yeah. I think there should also be like a space tax maybe, you know, like tax all those billionaires for their satellites and then use that money to fund space telescopes, you know, because it seems like that's what astronomy is going towards, which is, you know, as we get more and more light pollution,

First, we went up to the top of mountains to put telescopes, and now we're putting telescopes up in space to get away from human light. And so maybe what you just haven't paid for more space telescopes? That sounds good to me. I'm always going to vote for more taxes on billionaires to fund more science. Sign me up. But, you know, space telescopes are not always the answer. Like, there are advantages to space telescopes.

You're above the atmosphere, light pollution, this kind of stuff. But there are also a lot of advantages to ground-based telescopes. Like, you can't build a 30-meter telescope. scope in space because you can't launch something that big and it's harder to repair and to swap out instruments. So there's always going to be an important role for ground-based astronomy and we should make sure that we don't munge that up. I guess it's all just another sort of reminder of how things change in the universe, you know? It's not just sort of changing at a cosmic scale, but we can very easily change our view of it and our access to all that knowledge in the universe. Like,

you know, we have to be careful, right, when we do these things. We do. And as humans, we tend to assume the things are static or infinite. You know, the way we treat the ocean. We used to think the ocean is like an infinite source of water and you could just dump stuff in it and we just sort of like float away and dilute forever. But now we know that obviously it's not infinite and, you know, we filled it with microplastics and garbage and it's a real problem. Or like the air, we thought there was plenty of air or, you know, atmosphere and now we're

slowly clogging it up. Yeah. And forests, you know, we have very little like pristine wild nature left for that reason. So we have to be careful not to do the same things to space. While I'm a big believer in technology and space-based technology and all that cool stuff, we have to be very careful and do this in a thoughtful way. Save the night sky. Should we start that movement, Daniel, here on the podcast?

Are you going to be the spearhead for that? Yeah, keep dark skies dark. Keep stars bright. Keep space weird. Keep camping fun. But somehow, make it a little more comfortable, please. Yeah, put some of those mattressized satellites. You know, sprinkle them in the forest and then.

Daniel will always have a place to lay down on. All those s'mores do make me tired after a long day of camping. All right. Well, the next time you look up at the night sky, appreciate the view because maybe someday soon, what you'll be seeing are fake stars, basically. Not real, actual exploding stars out there in the universe. And let's hope that we can learn as much as we can about the nature of the universe

before we do change the night sky forever. Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Get fired up, y'all. Season two of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway.

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