Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - The New Space Race!

Episode Date: September 24, 2021

This week we're back with another special episode! David comes on to lead Marques and Andrew through a discussion about internet for all via Starlink satellites and some of the effects it can have on astronomy and observers of the night sky. It's a big topic but also a fun discussion with plenty of expert interviews. Twitter Links: https://twitter.com/wvfrm https://twitter.com/mkbhd https://twitter.com/andymanganelli https://twitter.com/AdamLukas17 https://twitter.com/DurvidImel Follow us on Instagram! https://www.instagram.com/wvfrmpodcast/ Special thanks to: Emily Zhang: https://twitter.com/emilylinzhang Dr. Jeremy Tregloan-Reed: https://bit.ly/3kzhAeQ Dr. Jonathan McDowell: http://www.planet4589.org/ Dr. Josef Koller: https://bit.ly/3zzRvjR Robin Dicky: https://bit.ly/2ZrI9dP Links: shop.mkbhd.com https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge betmgm operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario hello hello welcome back to another episode of the waveform podcast we're your hosts i'm marquez

and i'm andrew and today we've got David Amell with us as well for another special deep dive episode. I'm going to say keep your 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 right. So you guys heard of the space race of the 1960s. Well, we're in 2021.

And today on the show, we've got a new space race for you. A space race that you haven't probably thought about before. Stick with us. NASA's space shuttle program was a shining new phase in America's journey to the stars. Kind of a curious mix of science, business, and self-aggrandizement for a very small billionaire class. In part because, as I said, this is the first time that we're going to see a launch from American soil in almost 10 years time. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0.

Ignition. Liftoff. So I'm about to bring you guys into a deep rabbit hole of exploration, mind-blowingness, and space stuff, as 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 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 like fourth, fifth, sixth grade, like reading way too much about space comes up. So I'm excited. This will be interesting because there's a lot of space trivia in this. Let's see it. All right, I'm ready. Okay.

All right. Well, first question I got for you guys. Do you know what satellite internet is? Just on a basic level? Yeah. How does it work? Well, as far as I can tell, there's a bunch of satellites in space

and there's a bunch of data centers on Earth. And when people request information from the internet it pings one of the satellites that's sort of geo-locked over them right and then it goes down to a data center and then it goes up to the satellite goes back to the person that's something like that assuming similar to like satellite television yeah uh data transfer through wireless waves pinging off of satellites but that's like the total basis of my knowledge on that right right okay well so as of as of 2018 um how many people would you say didn't have access to internet in the u.s and globally didn't have access to the and we're saying like access in their homes right like

didn't have access to the, and we're saying like access in their homes, right? Like general access. It doesn't count if you go to Starbucks or something like that. Yeah, right. Most people have access to internet. You said 2018. Yeah, I would be estimating 90% of the US

has access to the internet. I'll guess 80% has access. Okay. So as of 2018, about 14 million people in the u.s didn't have internet access at all okay and 25 million people didn't have broadband access or faster so that's like like internet you need to do video calls you know there's we've got a pandemic going on the stuff you need to do school with you know that's like a pretty sizable percentage i mean just because

you have broadband internet doesn't mean it's great internet either. There's a difference between like having speed and consistency as well, right? It's about 4%. Yeah. Okay. So that's just the US though. Yeah.

Think about how much of the world 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 really exciting. But yeah, it's definitely probably like 60% of the world, 70% of the world has internet access. But it's not as good as certain individual countries. Right. Give a guess, Andrew. You know, I was very off for the US, so I feel like 70-75% has access worldwide.

You guys are close. Marques got it perfectly right, actually, immediately. About 40% of the planet isn't online yet. That's a lot of people. 40% of the entire planet. More than 3 billion people still don't have access to the internet. 3 billion. That's a lot of people, right?

And at this point, like in 2021, the internet's like become this essential utility for everything that we do. Like you think about YouTube, you can learn anything. You can learn any skill. You don't really need to go to college anymore. You can kind of learn whatever trade you want, you know? anymore you can kind of learn whatever trade you want you know um and even if you go into a store and you want to apply for a job most of them will say like oh apply online apply online right you know it's it's ridiculous it's crazy i was thinking about sorry i'm interrupting but the beginning of

this pandemic where 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 to find other context clues to alert you about what's happening right and there was like road signs that said like things about covid and there was like people started wearing masks more in the airport but you didn't unless you looked it up it would be hard to know it's kind of like um that it reminds me of this story about war of the worlds there's this thing that happened in new jersey affiliated...and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the air in the War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

Where they were playing the War of the Worlds radio show in New Jersey, but they had like a public service announcement that was going over that was like taking over the broadcast. 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 the War of the Worlds and announcement where it said, by the way, what you're about to hear is not real.

And they played the role of the world and there was a total public freak. Everyone was, everyone actually thought aliens were 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 have access to this internet. So wouldn't you agree that satellite internet, the idea that these satellites can, you know, orbit the planet, they can kind of reach everywhere, right?

There's 40% of the earth that's not online. And because satellites can orbit the earth, if you get enough of them, you can kind of get internet anywhere you are on the planet. Do you agree that

that's a pretty good thing overall? Seems like a good idea. The way you're asking it seems like I shouldn't say yes. Seems like how a podcast would start. 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 establishing an in-the-ground infrastructure in hard-to-reach places. Right. And the world's been changing. People are working from home. There's nomadic and creator economy lifestyles and if people can kind of just have the internet they can kind of work from anywhere. So it seems great.

Have you heard of Starlink before? Yeah. I heard that sort of floated around. I think I know a couple people on Twitter who have Starlink internet. Do you want to give a quick explanation of what you believe it to be? Starlink is an Elon Musk company

and they're putting a bunch of satellites in orbit and giving people Starlink is an Elon Musk company and, uh, they're putting a bunch of satellites in orbit and giving people Starlink internet essentially. And I don't know if it's any better than regular internet other than just being accessible in more places, but yeah, that's about all I know. Yeah. So, so the older satellite internet, satellite internet surprisingly has been around for a very long time. Yeah.

I showed you guys where I grew up yesterday, the middle of absolute nowhere, Smartville, California, and we had what was called HughesNet at the time. And that was way back in the early 2000s, right? HughesNet's been around since 1996. Satellite internet's been an idea for a while. But those satellites, there were very few of them, and they were in what's called geosynchronous orbit which means that as the earth rotates

the satellite is at a position in orbit where it's rotating with the earth so like that's good and bad it's good because as long as you have a clear view of the sky you can consistently get internet but when

something is further away, there is this law called the inverse square law. And it kind of relates to both like light and data transmission and all that stuff. Basically, the further something is away to an nth degree weaker the signal is. So if you're in geosynchronous orbit, it's higher up in orbit,

which means it stays with the earth. But the speeds you're getting are not that great. You're getting pretty slow. It's not even DSL. They have over the years, companies like HughesNet have been able to get faster speeds, but they're still not that fast. They're still slower than most data connections. So Starlink is this new company that, like you said, was launched by Elon Musk that is trying to make satellite Internet much more readily available.

And it's supposed to be much, much faster. He wants it to be able to be like you can game on it, which means like they want latency. That's like one MS, like 10 MS is like what they're aiming for right now with the latency. And then they want gigabit internet off of satellite i want gigabit internet sounds great yeah that's cool because yeah it's cool because you have a little dish you can 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 it's kind of amazing right like sounds like a great promise yeah yeah exactly it's one of those

things where like we have wired internet right now and everything you said doesn't happen. The best I've ever had is Fios, like 800 or 900 down. But even playing games like Valorant, pinging to an East Coast server, we're on the East Coast, it's like 20 to 30. Right. Yeah, at like 1 MS is...

Or it's 10 is what they're aiming for. Even 10. 10 is what they're aiming for. I don't think I've ever seen 10 MS ping. Yeah. 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 only kind of recently heard of it. It's only because it's starting to just recently start parklading and like get online. It actually was announced in 2015. The project's been in development for quite a while, but they only got the first two beta tested satellites up in 2018. So it hasn't really been in orbit for that long. And after they tested those satellites,

they actually got, they were able to move more satellites into even lower earth orbit. So something 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 orbit, which means they are much closer to Earth,

but because they are much closer to Earth, they move really fast. They are not in the orbit where they are turning with the planet. They are rocketing across the sky. Okay, so does that mean when you are on the ground, you are going to be switching between satellites over and over again? Yes. Yeah, they kind of create this big mesh network. Cool.

Mesh networks always work. Yeah, right? Right? Yeah. And when they launch them up there, they deploy like 60 at a time. And it's really interesting. You can kind of see these chains of Starlink satellites that are just going across the sky together. And it's really interesting.

But when you have satellites that are shooting across the sky that fast, you have to put a lot more of them up there because obviously, like you said, you're going to lose signal quickly. And yes, because of the inverse square law and because of advancements in internet technology, we have way faster internet from them now. But you're going to try to keep linking to new locations constantly this is reminding me very much of 5g just millimeter wave every time

you hear about these millimeter wave towers and you walk by one on the street and you 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 connected it is it is very similar to that idea, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, wow. That is one constellation of Starlink satellites.

Have you ever played snake.io? Yeah, it looks like that. You can just see them like stars moving across the sky. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This kind of gets into this whole thing, right? This is quite interesting. I mean, for audio listeners, it was basically just, it looks like if just Orion's belt was even closer together times 20

and just like moving across the sky. Yeah. That's fascinating. So those were the first 60 that got deployed in May 2019. Okay. Okay. So like they send up this pod and then as they get into orbit they just start deploying like doom doom doom doom doom 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 game time how many satellites would you guys say we're in space right now how many satellites are in space yeah like wow space our orbit or just space in general space most of them are in earth's orbit 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 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 i think so i think that's fair because it's not okay in earth's orbit currently in earth launched from or earth yes everything launches from earth yes i think it's launched from mars i love all the i'm saying you know i think there's

probably um 400 satellites 400 in earth's Earth's orbit. Okay. Any guess I make is just completely blind. I'll guess 401. Sure. Okay. How many would you say have ever been launched in history altogether? Satellites. Oh.

I guess I just assumed when they break, they just stay out in space and i was counting those so that used to be how it worked they okay they like come back they can eventually some can now fall yeah let's go with 800 ever so 400 now 800 ever yeah okay it's probably like a like a one of these curves like this yeah like for the last hundred years not very many than a couple hundred years because we didn't launch very much and then we just started getting all of them

and now half of them are out of orbit that's my guess okay so 12,020 have ever been launched okay that's a lot more

than 800 and that is that is like that has been bolstered very recently I will say that 7,520 are still in space right now.

I was closer. Wow, 7,000, okay. And about 4,500 are active. So almost half of those that are in space are not doing anything right now, right? And those are all numbers from August 2021, according to the European Space Agency, who kind of keeps data on this. So's very very very active only a couple months prior when i was doing this uh initially

it was only about 6 000 in space as of like the beginning of the year so that's been a lot and especially when you consider that 12 000 have only been ever launched and in only a few months yeah one twelfth of that has been accelerated, right? Do you know where they're launching from? I think Cape Canaveral or something. Are a lot US-based? I'm not entirely sure specifically where, but I know that they're usually around the equator.

So wherever they do launch from, it's probably around Florida, Texas. Because you said earlier 6,000, now there's 7,000. So that means 1,000 of them have, oh, but it's like a pod. Since January. It's not like each individual launch. No, each individual launch is about 60 satellites that go up together. Still a lot of launches in a couple months. Okay, yeah.

So Starlink, decent part of this. How many would you guys guess that Starlink is trying to launch right now as sort of part of their little network? Like a goal? Considering that they're going to, like they have authorization. I'm guessing they want to completely. In the next year or two. Like two years, basically.

They want to finish the job. They want to cover the entire Earth and have this whole thing available for everyone on Earth. I guess that's the goal, right? Yeah, because they have to have this mesh network. They're moving really quickly. Right. What would your guess be?

Maybe they want to double it. Maybe they want 7,000 more satellites. I was going to go like 10,000, yeah. Yeah. That's a lot. 42,000 satellites. Whoa. Okay. That's a lot. 42,000 satellites. Whoa. Okay.

That's a lot of satellites. That they have authorization to launch. Not only that they want to, but they already have authorization from the FCC. Okay. That's a lot. That's a lot. My eye keeps thinking about that clip you just showed us of like watching 60 in a row pass by you in the night sky with your naked eye. Just imagining the sky like looking like it's moving all the time and then getting like motion sickness.

Like looking up in the air. Stars like in a row rotating around you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a little different, right? Like stars that we see in the night sky, they don't really, they're moving, but not really. We're kind of moving around them. It's a different way. Okay.

So, yeah. So, the reason that we found this topic at all, title card, is that Adam actually sent me this article called SpaceX Dark Satellites Are Still Too Bright for Astronomers. It was in Scientific American. And I thought, hmm, this is interesting. The article basically says that yeah, Starlink is very cool.

It's a great idea. But it's creating a lot of issues for astronomers. They are reflecting light from the sun and it's kind of messing up things in astronomy, a lot of different types of astronomy interesting yeah so there's telescopes on earth that are trying to look at things far far

away and these these satellites are flying in between 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 you're doing like a long exposure photo, for example, like all astronomers do super long exposures, they do up to like two days, right? Of exposures. And with the geosynchronous orbit satellites, they know exactly where they are at all times. They can just point the satellite in a different direction. They're able to do it. They can avoid it. And there's not that many, right? Because 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 and you don't really know where the path of them is and when you can avoid them and and the fact that like you know right

now there have only been a couple thousand that have been launched and that's already creating a problem yeah what happens when there are 42,000? So at first, these Starlink satellites were like really, really bright, right? They were reflecting light from the sun and basically astronomers

would like, you know, they'd point their satellites at them and they'd be like, oh, a star. And then they'd look, they'd point their telescope

at them. Telescope, yeah. And they'd be like, oh, look, a star. And then they would see, oh, that's a satellite. That's actually a satellite, not a star. Moving too fast.

Yeah, so both it was moving too fast and then it was like, it's just too freaking bright. And there's all these different issues that it was creating because these were reflecting so much light that it could actually damage the telescope because their sensors are really, really sensitive and light from stars are so far away.

And because of that inverse square law, the light from a star is like you're getting way less light than it's actually emitting, whereas the satellite reflecting all that sunlight beaming, it's like when you take a magnifying glass on an ant, right? You're kind of burning the sensor, and you can actually break the sensor because they're so bright. So that was kind of a major issue.

And like credit to Starlink, they don't want to necessarily just, they want to work with the astronomers, right? It's kind of this like 50-50 word thing where like, yeah, we're going to do this. We got authorization and we're just going to do it. We'll try to mitigate the problems that we create, but we're still going to do it. I have a question about these astronomers astronomers are these amateur astronomers are these professional astronomers because when i think of astronomers there's obviously telescopes on earth huge observatories that have to look through the atmosphere but there's also telescopes in orbit

that i assume are above a lot of these satellites and they do that for an unobstructed view of the atmosphere. How much of these astronomers complaining are professional astronomers versus hobbyists in the backyard? Is it both? So a lot of professional astronomers. I'm going to guess just because it's cameras and long exposure that kind of...

When I was first thinking of this I was thinking of someone looking with their eye through a telescope and it reflecting light but if it sounds like it's destroying long exposure like astrophotography not even astrophotography like yeah it's like astronomers deep space yeah yeah yeah no it's it's both um basically they do eventually a lot of these astronomers that I talked to did say that they eventually are going to probably need to put satellites into 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 the LSST.

It's in Chile. And it's pretty much the biggest telescope that has ever been created. It has the biggest sensor that has ever been made. It's like multiple gigapixels. And it takes like up to two minute or two day photos basically. I love these things. And the point of this is to like explore things like dark matter and

just like 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 smartphone review with it. I think that's the plan too. Turn around, point it back at Earth. That'll be fun too. Yeah, that'll be cool. You can see us. Yeah, yeah. And they basically said to put a telescope like this into space they're just way too big way too heavy it's right now it's just too much to get that into orbit they're so massive

these are huge telescopes um so yeah so like starlink was you know they were still trying to work with astronomers because they they understood, yeah, this is kind of a problem. We're still going to do it, but it's kind of a problem. So they worked with astronomers to create these conferences called SATCON. There's SATCON 1, SATCON 2 that have happened so far. After SATCON 1, they basically were like, okay, the biggest issue right now is that these are reflecting too much light. The biggest issue right now is that these are reflecting too much light, and there is different degrees of brightness where it becomes not as much of an issue for the astronomers.

So they tried different things. They painted the satellites black. Nice. Right? Okay, not black satellites. I'm on board. Just keep going. So they're darker, so they're not reflecting as much light.

Starlink sends those up. They start burning up and heating up like a crap load because the temperature difference when the Earth is facing the sun versus when it's not facing the sun. Very big difference. It gets really hot and really cold in space. Yeah. Yeah. So that became an issue.

It was overheating all the Starlink satellites. Okay. Now they actually do something called Visorsat, which is actually putting little, basically putting sunglasses on the satellites. Cool.

Yeah, you know. Huh. Neat. Which kind of like, it darkens it for the astronomers. And then one other thing that they do is during the periods of time

when the astronomers need to be seeing into space, these satellites will rotate their solar cells to be a knife's edge versus the Earth. That's cool. So now instead of blocking this amount, you're only blocking like this amount. Right. Does that affect that the Internet that they're sending? No.

OK. That's mostly that's just for power. OK. So it's collecting power while the astronomers sort of don't need to use it. OK. Okay. That's mostly, that's just for power. Okay. So it's collecting power while the astronomers sort of don't need to use it. Okay. Yeah. But we found this article really intriguing because it was like, it seems like there could be a lot more to this.

It was also written a couple of years ago. So I really wanted to like catch up with the update, right? Because things like the LSST, the new telescope in Chile, it was actually supposed to go into service end of this year or next year, which is crazy because it's been being worked on since 2008. Imagine, you get all of this funding, it's the biggest astronomical project of all time, and all of a sudden the entire atmosphere just becomes littered in orbit with all these satellites.

It's crazy, right? the entire atmosphere just becomes littered in orbit with all these satellites. Wow. It's crazy, right? It's funny that like I'm picturing if you zoom way out from Earth, it's like, oh, Earth, these Earthlings want to connect with like other like maybe intelligent civilizations, but they've surrounded 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 a concern that we'll get into later.

Adam, so we called up Emily, who is the person that, Emily Zhang, she's the person that wrote this article for Scientific American. I'm Emily Zhang. I recently graduated from Columbia University. I did some freelance science journalism, which is how this article came about.

And I currently work for the Veritasium YouTube channel. So this article, I majored in astrophysics. So my background is in astronomy. And naturally, one of the biggest conflicts or concerns in the astronomical community at the time that I wrote the article, and I would say today, is satellite constellations. So she was an astrophysicist and now she works for Veritasium, which is kind of amazing. Kind of shows that like you can go to school for anything and still be a YouTuber.

The internet. At the end of the day. The internet. Yeah, so the biggest thing that she wanted to really highlight to us when we called her was that this is kind of happening with astronomers not really being able to do anything about it, right? It's kind of just like, there's no laws really about space.

We just, I think the main sentiment would be powerlessness, because I think these astronomers, they're not saying like down with SpaceX and Starlink and Blue Origin and Project Kuiper and all of these forever. I think we understand that, you know, there are multiple parties involved and we're going to have to compromise. But the main thing is that I think we just, astronomers haven't really been able to do anything at all. Um, and so having to sit on the sidelines while what you study and what your expertise is in is, is being dominated by these other forces that are very new to the game. I think it's difficult to just have to be a bystander to that.

I would say it's pretty concerning that internationally and even nationally we're not seeing much discussion about regulation, about laws around this. There's this space treaty that was written during the space race but it was very vague it was specifically written between nation states so not about individual corporations and companies and really the main thing that it wanted to highlight was not being able to use space for like war purposes like there were still ways there's loopholes that were written in so that you probably could use it for war purposes. There were still ways, there's loopholes that were written in so that you probably could use

it for war purposes. But the idea was you can't mount a rocket launcher on the moon. You can't make a giant space laser that is mounted somewhere. But again, this space treaty was written literally in the 60s during the original space race.

The world has changed a lot since then, clearly. A little. And I don't think it took into account the fact that now, instead of there being a space race between individual countries, it is now billionaire corporations, right? There's like, even recently in the news,

it's been the billionaire space race. What's being called the dawn of a new space age. Billionaire Richard Branson, now the first person Tomorrow, another billionaire is paying his way into space race what's being called the dawn of a new space age billionaire richard branson now tomorrow another billionaire is paying his way into space 71 year old branson beating amazon founder jeff bezos to space by just nine days we've got jeff bezos versus elon musk versus uh the virgin galactic guy um yeah i don't know richard branson richard branson uh and all these people are just like sending themselves into space they're sending other peopleanson uh and all these people are just like sending themselves

into space they're sending other people into space and it's kind of just a flex um but the fact that it is now individuals kind of makes this a lot more complicated because at least the un can kind of like make these treaties and talk about who can do what but the nature of capitalism is to produce more and better than your competition. And when you have these companies like Amazon slash Blue Origin, you've got SpaceX, you've got Facebook that are all wanting to get on top of each other

and just beat each other out, then what do you do? So anyway, but what Emily was kind of trying to say was that like, this is all happening, right? This is all exponentially growing and these astronomers don't really have a big say in it. Yeah, it makes me think about like how far above a country is still the country?

I'm sure there's some rule about this. There is no rule about this. Because obviously if you fly over another country, you're in airspace. That's one thing. But if you're at 40,000 feet or if you're at another country in certain airspace, that's one thing. But if you're at 40,000 feet or if you're at 100,000 feet, where does that end?

And then suddenly you're in high earth orbit. Officially space. So it's like there's not really... And then the other thing is the satellites are just streaking. They're going so fast that it's like they're in one country and another country and another country.

The issue is we've got a similar situation again like we have with certain types of social media and so on and so forth, where technology is advancing faster than regulations can keep up. That was Jeremy. He's an astrophysicist we talked to in Chile, sort of like Facebook and Twitter and 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 point where we should have regulated this. Yeah, exactly. You know? And so that's the thing about space right now is like, and so that and holy crap we're way past the 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 head like how do you regulate this because again like you said that's it's something that's way up in

orbit it's not in a country and then the other thing is there's not a lot of incentive for individual governments to necessarily regulate it. Yeah, like who regulates it? Right. And also your country's GDP is determined by how much output it makes. And so if there are more companies in your country that want to get into this newfound frontier that makes a lot of money, you don't really have any incentive to say no. So we want to learn a little bit more 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

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 untouched territory like nobody knows what to do are we all on the same page that it should be regulated like the obvious path is that they're about to put 40 000 new satellites into orbit and it's gonna really suck for astronomers on earth which is most astronomers yeah something should be done or they're just gonna do it it'll suck for everyone on earth if we don't regulate right at some point and actually there was this this tweet that I saw that said once SpaceX gets 12,000 of the 42,000 up,

and originally, they had only asked for 12,000 and it got accepted. And then it got accepted so easily that very soon after, they were like,

can we put 30,000 more? And the FCC was like, sure. And I was like, what? They didn't really have any reason to say no. Yeah.

I guess they didn't think of any. But is it going to be bad for us on Earth because now the night sky looks different? Or will we even be able to see that? Multiple things. There was a tweet that I saw that basically said, once the 12,000 are up, the number of satellites that we will be able to see

will outnumber the amount of stars we will be able to see. So the night sky, we kind of think they're just depending on where there are satellites and to be fair the way that their visor setting these and all these things a lot of times it can make it so it's hard to see with your naked eye especially during the day you'll most easily be able to see them at dawn and dusk. And the fear is that the worst affected science is actually some of the most important. That was Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at Harvard. It's the science where you're doing wide area surveys, looking at a lot of sky, low near

the horizon early in the evening at twilight Which is when the satellites are absolutely the worst But that's where you have to look to find the asteroid that's gonna hit the earth So that what we call planetary defense Subset of astronomy is the one that's potentially most threatened so we might lose that kind of uh astronomy which is not great yeah so for context there are about the upper estimates are about 10 000 visible stars in the night sky at night depending regardless of where you are on earth oh yeah yeah so it'll 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 because not only is it going to, you know, is it emitting all this stuff, but also even if you turn the wings so that they're knife's edge towards the earth, the core part of the satellite

is still blocking a light signal from coming through of a potential, 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 that just fly through your image when you're using, when you're doing long exposure stuff, right? Yeah. So this is when a single satellite flies through Hubble's field of view. Wow. It's just a big slash

straight through your image. Yep. You know, you're getting this deep space image. Honestly, that'd probably make for a really good YouTube intro sequence. 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 many random elements of it that you can tell are natural.

And then there's just this perfectly straight line straight through the metal. Beautiful stars and then just straight line. And just imagine that's like one telescope. Oh my gosh. That's one satellite. Imagine what happens when you've got potentially hundreds or thousands that are coming. And that's interesting because Hubble is one of the atmospheric telescopes. It's already orbiting Earth.

But it's lower orbit than a lot of these low orbit Earth satellites. Oh, wow. So this is even messing with those satellites. Even if you put these telescopes into space, then you could still have satellites coming through, which is wild. That's brutal.

Just wild. Wow. Yeah. I love Hubble. I know. Hubble's so dope. And they're actually going to replace Hubble pretty soon. Right.

Which is cool as well. But yeah, so we want to learn more about this. So she had us call up these two people, this one guy named Jeremy Tregelone-Reed, who is an astronomer in Chile and an astrophysicist named Jonathan McDowell at Harvard. So we first called up Jeremy in Chile. And surprise, surprise, our call had a lot of issues, a lot of problems. His internet was not great.

And we actually had to call him a second time a couple weeks later because we tried to salvage the call we had. But 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. And then the service that we use

that does the podcasting interviews just couldn't upload his side. We only got 15 minutes of raw data and it was just not good. Sounds like we need Starlink. Yeah, so that's the funny thing is he was like, this is really affecting my work, but I could really use one of these

Starlings right now. It was just, it was so ironic. We asked him about the LSST telescope and he just said, like, you know, Yes, I see it as things stand at this precise moment in time.

Yes, I do see it as being a major development issue this could be such a major issue because they've been working on it since like 2008 and then all of a sudden there's going to be thousands just flying through and the lsst works on more than just optical stuff it also does radio um telescope work radio astronomy which starlink specifically is another problem for because not only are you blocking 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 listening for energy coming out

of black holes, which is wild. And there's just these faint whispers from, you know, wherever the heck and they're in Chile and there's no signal coming through they're literally listening for black holes yeah and then you think about okay there's this satellite that's whizzing by not only is it brighter than it should be and it's blocking potential signals from coming through it's also shooting down gigabit internet which is a radio signal puking in it all over the telescope and and he was telling me that these that whiz by they could literally just make the your entire image just white and radio astronomy is a lot more sensitive some of these objects are thousands of times brighter than the

sun is to these radio telescopes and that can cause burnouts with equipment and you know damage equipment which is a cost money to replace and loss of observing time because you have to wait for the equipment to be replaced. Some of the space telescopes, we take a two-day exposure, and so because we're looking for ludicrously faint things, right? And so you go, oh, here's a light ray from that star. Here's another light ray from that star, right? so it doesn't take so when you have a bloody bright satellite going overhead it leaves a really bright trail on your image that saturates the detector that's trying to look for so much fainter stuff they could literally

just make the your entire image just white yeah Like it can completely ruin the image and it could also be one of the things that breaks the telescope. And this telescope, there's been millions and millions of dollars invested into this telescope. And so the fact that they've been working on this basically since 2008, it's supposed to be operational by 2023. It was supposed to be 2022, but then COVID. And then out of nowhere, like a couple years before you open,

all of a sudden the 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 by the time you're done, they build another property right in front of the ocean or something. Yeah, yeah, pretty much. Pretty much.

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four tasty chicken tenders, four regular sides, and everybody's favorite, four buttermilk biscuits. Hurry up though, like the holiday season, Popeye's $25 festive family box deal will be over before you know it. Love that chicken from Popeye's. All right, so we're back. Again, we got two independent recommendations for Jonathan McDowell, this astrophysicist at Harvard. And he proceeded to sort of blow our minds about how ridiculous this is all going.

The bottom line is there's nowhere to hide from these satellites, right? It's also a problem for radio astronomy. We have these radio telescopes in very isolated regions where there's no radio transmissions in the vicinity except if a satellite's coming overhead. Lots of radio, very bright radio transmissions. And even if they're in a fairly narrow band, and mostly if 1% leaks out into a slightly different frequency we're trying to listen to these incredibly faint whispers from distant you know creating black holes and and a tiny amount of bleed off from this super loud

searchlight radio satellite uh is just going to swamp us what if orbit is just totally filled with signals from these satellites and we can't listen for these whispers anymore? We're basically creating this kind of dome around the Earth where we can't listen outside of it. We can't look for things outside of it. We can't listen for things outside of it. And he is convinced that there's going to be a catastrophic failure event

before anything is actually done about this problem. Have you guys heard of Kessler syndrome before? Kessler? Kessler syndrome. I have not heard of that. Can't say I have. No? Okay. So in orbit, things are really just falling.

They're in free fall, right? That's something I think a lot of people don't actually realize is that they're just far away enough from the earth so that they are falling towards the earth, but they're also falling in a direction, in a vector away from the earth. And they're at a such direction that they're just kind of like spinning

because it's just this combination of downward force and then outward force, and it kind of creates this angled vector. So when are in freefall they can fall really fast right so Kessler syndrome is when you get something in orbit that hits another thing in orbit and then it creates shrapnel in orbit slash freefall and that creates more shrapnel and then that hits more stuff which creates more shrapnel this reminds me of a scene in interstellar yeah i don't know if you've seen that movie i watched it like two weekends ago but there is an explosion of one satellite in space and some of the shrapnel

is heading towards some of the astronauts because the thing exploded and it's going everywhere and there's a part in the movie where all the shrapnel arrives and it tears a hole in the spaceship and the space station has a hole in it now right yeah yeah i mean so how how fast do you guys think that things move oh they're going fast when they're orbiting yeah i've seen videos from the international space station where that is also orbiting and it's going like 20 25 000 miles an hour like it's you they orbit the earth like eight times in a day which is some insane number i have no idea what i assume two things colliding at that speed is just instant destruction of both those things pretty much instantly yeah yeah yeah so things are in free fall generally around 17 000 miles per hour there's um something that happened to the ISS recently

a few years ago where like it was like a piece of debris a paint chip something came off of a satellite hit the ISS it was so tiny it was like a particle and it left a crater in the ISS like this big oh my goodness

like a softball size sorry to interrupt by the way. The movie we're thinking of is Gravity. Gravity. Oh. Dang. Probably Gravity. Wait, Interstellar? I watched Interstellar.

With Matthew McConaughey. Yeah, that had Matthew McConaughey. Yeah, it was. And there was a scene where it destroyed the satellites? Maybe it was Gravity. Maybe it was. Did it have Sandra Bullock? In Gravity, that definitely happened

that's gravity yeah so things are moving at 17,000 miles per hour basically it just causes chain reactions and so I'm starting to get nervous he's telling me about this stuff and I'm like okay so you've got SpaceX and Amazon

slash Blue Origin and Facebook and Boeing these are all companies that are confirmed to be putting satellites into space, right? This is just the United States. If SpaceX themselves, Starlink is putting forward 2,000 up, Amazon is supposed to put a few thousand up already. They are confirmed to be doing this.

Facebook is trying to put up a little mini constellation. Facebook, wow, okay. Yeah. Boeing, and it's just like, these are just US.s companies again yeah and they really have not a lot of incentive to talk to each other besides like maybe the fear of kessler syndrome happening but there's this estimate by that by like a couple years from now there's going to be over a hundred thousand satellites in space right and yes orbit

is very large and there's a lot of room but yeah it's pretty big 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 of the oceans is like they're really big we can throw lots of crap in there forever and it'll never make a difference oops no it didn't, it doesn't work that way. And so that's the same with space. Space is famously big. When you have 100,000 satellites, even one creating shrapnel

and you no longer have the ability to control that shrapnel and it's going everywhere, you can't really like, if the chunks are big enough, you could probably track it but if they're shrapnel which like you know a little paint chip came off and damaged the iss you can't really track that it's just going to go everywhere yeah it's no longer uh are we just creating this sort of like radio bubble where we can't hear anything outside of the earth if you have a hundred thousand satellites creating shrapnel you're going to create this dome of 17 000 mile per

hour shrapnel around the earth where you can no longer send anything into space do you remember that article this was probably a few months ago where there was a i think it was a chinese satellite that had like lost communication or power or something and was going to fall out of orbit but we didn't know where because it was not being communicated with and it was it was sort of a trending topic for a couple days where 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 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 going and going i feel like uh maybe one of these events he's talking about looks kind of like that,

where one thing starts to fall out of orbit and as soon as you can't communicate with it, it could hit another thing. And then that's the chain reaction you're talking about. And it creates almost a, there's this idea of creating like a sphere around the earth that creates this self-sustaining biosphere sort of we could create 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 a moat but now you can't yeah right and so so like to be fair the newer satellites have um avoidance systems where they're able to sort of like if they track something coming towards them they they can avoid. They can dodge things? They can dodge things. Technology is crazy. Yeah, yeah. There was this event that happened

where the Space Force, now US Space Force, noticed that one of the Starlink satellites was coming within technically like 10 times the limit that it allows allows which I think was still like a couple kilometers it's still very far it was a couple kilometers or a few kilometers and they were

like it's probably not going to hit it but this is still 10 times over our limit and so they have propulsion systems in the Starlink satellites that allow them to kind of move but still it's more of a communication thing, right? Because you get all of these companies. And so I started thinking about what happens when every other country starts getting in

the game. Obviously, China's competing with us. Russia's competing with us. India's competing with us. The UK, there's this one internet company called OneWeb from the UK that's also teamed up with India that's putting stuff into space. And individual countries have even less incentive to communicate with other countries, right? The only incentive that they really have in this whole satellite space race is it costs them money if their satellites break by hitting other people's satellites, which is crazy. And again, it's like the FCC and the EPA, the Environmental 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 light pollution really is that nobody seems to be feeling responsible for it, right? That's Joseph Kohler. He's a space policy strategist at Aerospace.org. If you look at some announcements from the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, they have clearly stated that they feel that light pollution from space on the ground is in their job char of responsibilities. you know, from space on the ground is in their job char of responsibilities. However, they also provided since, I think, since 1986,

for many years, they've provided the FCC with a categorical exclusion, right? Basically telling them, telling the FCC, okay, you just go forward and provide your spectrum licenses and we don't have to look at those constellations from a light pollution perspective. It's very weird. It's like, it's just uncharted territory quite literally. Is it littering? If you put up a satellite and it falls down on the earth, did you litter?

Do you get charged for littering? I think so. I think there was actually a thing that happened where they said like, if your satellite crashes in another country, the country is liable for any damages that happens. I think the one that did end up falling out of orbit disintegrated before it hit anything.

Yeah. So a lot of the SpaceX Starlink satellites are made now to burn up in orbit. But something else that Jonathan McDowell told us was like, okay, so these are made to be able to go out of commission. You can propulsion them into low enough orbit so they ended up just falling into the atmosphere and disintegrating. these are made to be able to go out of commission. You can propulsion them into low enough orbit so

they ended up just falling into the atmosphere and disintegrating. But we also don't know what that much heavy metal is going to do to our atmosphere, right? Like we're already worried about putting too much carbon in our atmosphere. So that got us really concerned, especially for the multiple countries just not wanting to communicate with each other. And like I said earlier, the more GDP that your country is pumping out, the better your country is doing. And a lot of countries are just very happy

to have the higher GDP. And a lot of these countries are wanting to compete with the US too. And then there's individual companies within those countries. And it just kind of creates this exponential thing because it's like, yes, there's going to be 100,000 launching from the US

in the next couple of years. Let's not even think about China and Russia and India and the UK. Like, you know, it's ridiculous. It doesn't sound like there's a clear good solution. No. Like controlling space is probably the biggest question mark.

Like obviously we want to, everyone wants to be the one that controls space. And I feel like I've seen this meme on Twitter of like, you should buy land on Mars because somebody will buy it from you later. And who are you going to buy the land from? Who owns that land now? I don't know. There's a lot of questions about ownership of that space.

I don't know if there's an answer to it. Space president. Space president. It's like just because the US putS. put a flag in the moon doesn't mean we own the moon. Yeah, that could be, yeah, it's just the moon. Yeah, yeah. That just all got me thinking about regulation.

Like how do we slow this down? How do we make sure this is done safely? Like it's just going to happen whether or not we want it to, which kind of sucks. And the U.S. can't just say like, okay, we're going to take control of this, but we already let Starlink put 42,000 up.s can't just say like okay we're gonna take control of this 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 we already said yes i mean they could but then it's you know i don't know it seems they should

just set a this is my complete amateurism talking. They just said a hard limit. We will not allow more than X satellites to orbit Earth at once. Right. And I guess that's not a great answer because that just makes it a race for who can make them all the fastest. Yeah, but look, if the U.S. puts a limit and says 100,000, what happens when every other country is like, oh, cool, the U.S. is self-limiting themselves. Oh, yeah, true. We're going to put a million. We have no limits. We're just going to keep going.

Because the one that creates, that controls most of the network kind of is the winner. We've seen the same thing with 5G. With Huawei and Qualcomm, and everyone's trying to control the most broadband. There's a lot of parallels to 5G. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. All these, like... It's an infrastructure thing. There's a lot of unfounded concerns about 5G as well but there are still very valid concerns about like you're going to have to have a tower on every block in all of the world. That's just too much new metal.

Too much stuff to have around. Yeah, it's interesting. It all comes down to wavelength. It all comes down to basic physics where the faster you can move your wavelength the closer you have to be to that wave but yeah i mean jonathan was he was convinced that we were eventually going to have star wars because uh the outer space treaty of 1967 says you can't put weapons of mass destruction in space or you can't station them in space so actually if you read the treaty carefully you can put like high explosive uh space fighters out there that's completely consistent with the treaty

um there's nothing in the treaty that 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 not using weapons of mass destruction to do it. Right. You're not allowed to mount anything on any like body in space, but you can send like a warhead through space if you wanted to. 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 heck do we start regulating this obviously a lot of these astronomers have a very kind of negative very doomsday-esque idea of what will happen in the general sense that i got from all of them was kind of this just like yeah yeah we're screwed like the hobby yeah this almost happy like depression like is what i was getting um yeah so so jonathan gdall it was funny he was like don't worry the united states will absolutely use orbit for war and i was like cool cool cool great fun yeah great great great love it we should

make another one of those treaties yeah i brought that up actually i said do you think there will be a new space treaty that's going to be written up there's been a lot of discussion about that this treaty is 50 years old and it's really showing its age it's all written in terms of you know the assumption is that all the satellites are either Soviet or American, right? And space is a lot more complicated now. And so those assumptions don't hold. And it's sort of been kind of duct taped to keep working. But yeah, there needs to be a new outer space treaty, I think. And the question is, how can we get one? It's not going to be easy.

And he said, honestly, I don't think it'll happen anytime soon. If it does, it's going to be after things have gone bad. And again, there's just kind of this, so I don't want to like, you know, this podcast to be super downer, but. It seems like treaties usually come after things are ahead of the ride yeah which that's what it seems like he's saying yeah nobody really listens and people are screaming into the void until there's a major problem yeah you know i get everybody on the same page yeah so i kind of i was wondering like there's got to be somebody that is that is trying to regulate

this or trying to create regulation for this right like this can't just be happening and and nobody is working on some sort of regulation because if i'm this freaked out right now as an individual who just called a few people on the phone you know there's got to be other people so i found this website uh it's this organization called aerospace.org and they're this third party organization that creates kind of policy that they recommend to people like nasa or governments different governments um they try to you know figure they do testing to figure out how much of a problem these things in space are going 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 should be um so there are a couple people that i talked to about about that uh and mostly i came away with them sort of feeling like well there's going to be a monetary incentive for these companies to make these things safer mostly because of that kessler syndrome thing, and also because people do care to an extent, right? Still worried about the communications issues and all of the telescope problems that you're going to have when you have all of these satellites going over the top. But a lot of these people were kind of under the assumption

that it would regulate itself in a way, which I'm quite mixed on personally um they they kind of figured like because if you create issues like satellites running into each other there's going to be such a monetary issue where you're blowing up your own money and then you're also going to probably have to pay to clean up whatever happens The other thing about the financials is that in theory with that much scale, it gets cheaper and cheaper to launch satellites. Like we're supposed to have reusable rockets and we're supposed to be able to do this thing way more efficiently.

Kind of sounds like there's millions of cars on the road and it's in everyone's best interest not to crash, but if a couple crash, they're going to crash. It's a numbers game after a while. But Kessler syndrome doesn't happen on Earth, you know? We've got gravity here. Not quite, right, right, right. But even to that same, just the idea of, like,

it's in everyone's best interest not to ever crash into any other satellite. But there's going to be so many that mathematically, like, it's probably going to happen a couple times. Hopefully, with the best of the tech available it won't spiral out of control in some event but um they're just gonna have to deal with the financial repercussions yeah a couple of those and that's something emily was talking about was like it is a really really really expensive endeavor. And one could argue very inefficient. And so because of that, you know, the dream for Starlink, I'm sure, and these other companies is they figure out a way to make it cost effective. And over time, you know, the technology develops further and further, it will get cheaper. But right now, it's incredibly expensive. It still is. And what

they're sending up right now is costing them billions. It still is. And what they're sending up right now is costing them billions. It costs a crap load to launch these satellites right now. It's so expensive. And Starlink's goal is to bring high speed internet to everyone at a very low cost. Right now, the $500 dish plus $100 per month is not exactly bringing accessible internet to people who don't have access currently. Yeah. Jonathan McDowell said an interesting thing.

He 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 non-satellite-based internet in a lot of places is regulatory and not technical. Because, yes, 40% of the world doesn't have internet right now, but then can't we just give them internet the way we've

always given everybody internet like i can kind of see how that like there 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 like the satellite stuff so if they're charging like you said that kind of money for it currently i also i think it's just a monetary problem. It's not profitable to bring internet to these regions right now. Right. And until it is, the satellites seem like a good thing, but also so many issues. But that's also extremely expensive, and is that going to be profitable?

Well, they just think that they can get enough up, they can make it cheap enough to launch these into space and deploy enough of them that it'll eventually be and the 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 asked like why wasn't this a thing before right because huesnet like we said was a thing before with the geos geocentric orbit geosynchronous orbit or yeah uh 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 and most of the people I've talked to were like

it's a cost thing it's just like they realized it was not really profitable but when you have a billionaire space race with a few companies that have too much money and they don't know what to do with it that's when you start investing in the things that are inaccessible right now for 90% of companies that you can eventually become profitable, right? They're the only ones that can do this. And this is the only time in history where you have this much money in the hands of these few

companies. So it just becomes this thing. Another woman that we talked to named Robin, who was also part of that aerospace.org website, she told us there's this registration convention as well. There are a couple things that are already in place that have been there for a really long time. So although the Outer Space Treaty is kind of the number one most talked about space treaty, there is actually a couple others that were negotiated in the 60s and 70s.

And so one of them is the Registration Convention. And so that one has a lot of countries signed on, including the United States. And that means that countries will register their space objects with the United Nations and say, here's, you know, some basic features of the satellite, what it's doing, where it's going. You know, whether or not that treaty is fully implemented and whether countries are being super timely on when they send in their data and how much data they send. That's, you know, up for debate. But they also have lots of both governmental and non-governmental organizations that track space objects as well. Countries do need to register satellites with their trajectory, angle, direction that everybody is kind of proposing.

It hasn't really happened yet. Like a ledger? Yeah, like a ledger. Like a public ledger. Almost like a public ledger almost like a whole ledger yeah they they wanted to create this 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 situation i don't know if it would be run on the blockchain seems like it would be a good use of the blockchain a decentralized yeah log so nobody i mean not that

anybody would want to incorrectly input their satellite's direction and velocity. Well, it could be a malicious thing. I guess, yeah. With every system, somebody wants to take advantage of it. Some evil doctor genius could mess up the ledger and then create Kessler syndrome and destroy the planet if they wanted to. It's going to be a movie. On the blockchain. You can't do that.

So, Bitcoin. So, what's the Ethereum of of satellites just kidding don't answer that um so i i wanted to ask jonathan like what's the worst case in the future here and what's the best case that potentially happens right he says worst case nothing happens until something there's some disaster and then people go, I suppose we should actually fix this. And it's too little, too late. But that's the way humans do things. Depressing, I know. But just looking at the history of all of these issues, it's hard to draw any other conclusion. And so the best case scenario is you have an international system in which we keep track of and manage space as a

resource and make and and you know provide the opportunity for companies to do profitable things but constrained by uh um paying for the externalities right paying for the ways in which these satellites affect the environment and constraining how many satellites you can have without, you know, causing problems. And so I think we eventually have to evolve towards a system of that kind. And the question is, how long 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 to both of those yeah i'm not i'm not the expert at all go for it but on the the first one which was nothing happens until disaster yeah we have this thing now where we like name every disaster as it rolls through the country and it's it doesn't really seem to change anything so maybe we'd have to be like a super huge disaster right but the second part was, remind me of the second part again? The second part was the best case scenarios

where we have an international system where we manage like a block. Yeah, that kind of comes back to the self-regulating thing again. Yeah. If all these countries or these companies are following the regulation imposed by the countries they're in,

their gut reaction is to get out of that country 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 i read into when i hear you know so we're gonna set so the best the best case for you has some worst case implications yes it's kind of like the ireland tax law thing yeah yeah yeah what's that that's like where a lot of uh companies are actually headquartered in ireland no like federal income tax yeah apple gets a lot of flack for this all the time because they don't have to like pay certain types of taxes because they're technically headquartered in ireland oh is that like libya or something It's just a small number of countries

that have this particular rule where it's encouraging for, oh yes, this is great for businesses, but also now it's like a money shelter. It's like Delaware. A lot of companies will do that for Delaware too because they're technically headquartered in Delaware. So I really wanted to interrupt to say,

if you guys mention blockchain one more time, I'm turning this whole thing off. Your mics are off now. You know what's great about ambition? You can't see it. Some things look ambitious, but looks can be deceiving. Some things look ambitious, but looks can be deceiving. For example, a runner could be training for a marathon,

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do we think that this is worth it? How do we think this is going to go down? I asked a few people like what can people do? I wanted to figure out like what can people do to try to positively you know make positive change, right?

Because this is going to happen whether or not we want it to what can people do to really like make this nice i got a lot of different answers somebody said like go outside and enjoy the stars while you can i was just like i mean yes but also ouch yeah i don't have answer, but I do have a way of thinking about it, which is a lot of the stuff we do here is like we're looking at products and like the final product. Is it a good or a bad final product? And usually that's where my analysis ends. Yeah.

But there are some cases where the background noise that goes into creating the product is so strong that you have to consider that too one of them that we talked about briefly is 5g like i talk a lot about the final product of millimeter wave 5g of like it doesn't seem worth it you can't get your signal everywhere like this is a difficult thing uh to build up quickly and it doesn't seem like it holds signal around a corner like that's the product analysis but then the background analysis is like all the infrastructure all the like building you have to do and all the regulation and like having this thing on every street corner

and this kind of falls in the same vein it's like starlink yeah i'd like to have gigabit everywhere that sounds like a great product if it works you mentioned you've never seen 10 millisecond ping on a game what if you could everywhere? That would be amazing. It's obviously very difficult, but the background noise to making that happen is literally filling the atmosphere with tens of thousands of satellites

and possibly never seeing the stars the same way again. Or leaving the orbit of the Earth. I'm still surprised that Elon that too elon and starlink is potentially doing something yeah don't you want to go to our atmosphere so bad and is also somebody who wants to colonize mars so badly i mean ultimately that's after something bad happens but it sounds like if something bad happens it spirals and it's also that his thinking could be very like self-centric where he's not thinking about the, I mean, he's probably thought about all of this, I'm sure. But just the exponential growth of all the other companies plus all the other countries with a bunch of different companies within them versus just Starlink.

Because Orbit's big 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 Starlinks are one system. They're all talking to each other. But once you get satellites from other companies that are not talking to each other, there's some correlations with our road trips. It's naive to think if you do something like that, other people aren't going

to want to do that. So it's going to happen. That's the nature of capitalism is that there's going to be more and everyone's going to try to be doing better and more. Yeah. So if he's the one that wants exponential growth thing. Yeah. He's the one starting the ball rolling though and starting that going.

So that's why it's kind of weird to me. It's like a weird game of space monopoly. Yeah. Like if every if every car on the road 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 have that sort of lack of competition no i'm just giving the one upside because every company wants to be monopoly no no i agree but yeah so now you look at like okay if every satellite in space was talking to each other

that would be pretty good right but that's kind of impossible that's not how it works competition that's required here's a here Here's another image from 2019 showing a bunch of Starlink satellites flying through this giant image. Yeah. There's what? There's 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 construction site. You could paint the wall as much as you want

but it'll never look as good as you want with that four-year-old with the crayon in there. Yeah. Wow. So again, this is from two years ago and it's only a fraction of what we're going

to have. I think like going through this episode, it sounds bad, but my outlook on all of this has gotten grimmer and grimmer. Yeah. The minutes have gone by. Well, there was one guy we spoke to, Dr. Joseph Kohler, I believe. we spoke to Dr. Joseph Collar, I believe, and his outlook was more positive towards regulation coming from the companies themselves. Space companies are different type of companies in the sense that it's very, very capital intensive. Now, that being said, I think that gives us some

time from a regulatory perspective to understand what the projections are, what the forecasts are, what the type of satellite or constellations those companies are proposing, to start working with those companies, recognizing that there is a need, recognizing there's a common benefit, but also recognizing there's common risk, and starting to work with those companies and developing the right rules of the world and the right best practices so he was kind of saying that because of the monetary incentive that everyone has and it's in every company's best interest to not crash into another company that the regulation is going to come from the bottom up from the companies into government how do you guys feel about that i don't know if i buy

it's very optimistic especially early but it eventually becomes a numbers game and we see every company i mean every single company does things that take losses at some point and like that is something that's going to happen and like how catastrophic is that to to other things like as long as it's not catastrophic to their business they don't care yeah and i don't know if i trust that much for the rest of civilization i was trying to draw an analogy of like companies self-limiting themselves in order to not crash into others but it's just like i don't really see that in any other industry so yeah it would be very optimistic for 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 and think that right like we have companies that are going into regulations and still like not sell policing themselves with drawn line it's i know it's a very like sad 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 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 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 around it potentially yeah and start regulations i know it's like it that's the thing is like the

u.n space president yeah the u.n president for all of space. The UN is the group that had the space treaty, but it wasn't every country that signed on to it. A lot of countries have signed on but not ratified, which apparently signing on is technically the equivalent of ratifying, but you didn't actually sign the doc. You didn't ratify the documents. You didn't have people saying, yeah, we did.

It's confusing. But that's the thing. There there's no one like president of the planet and without that it's gonna be really hard are you suggesting planet president you're on to something yeah one that's what i'm suggesting yeah one big game monopoly yeah wow so on the flip side everyone gets free internet how important is that yeah i don't enjoy that 10 mil second part in here were we getting free and was it actually free yeah i was gonna say like everyone gets it's still that's 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 cheap enough to hit those places that are really not able to get internet right now is there a better solution to get internet to them by then it just feels like

something that's super super expensive which goal is to get something 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 problem right yeah you know because he will eventually profit a lot from it. Also, just a couple quick fact checks. It was the European Space Agency which had to take evasive action to stop its satellite from being hit with Starlink. There was a one in a thousand chance it was going to get hit,

but that was 10 times over their threshold that they were willing to cross. The average Starlink satellite is 573 pounds and about the size of a table. Oh, that's way smaller than I thought. Well, I don't know what table they're talking about. That's the thing. When I was doing this research, I was like...

500 pounds is not very... That's smaller than a car, for sure. Oh, the pounds, yeah. It's like a motorcycle. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, there's also 60 in the constellation. Well, yeah, yeah, still.

I mean 60 and we're talking about tens of thousands, potentially hundreds of thousands of them. I mean, there's going to be a lot of traffic up there. Yeah. And then, of course, we shared that article around recently about SpaceX doing like ads in space with satellites. I don't even want to think about that. I don't see how that's possible.

I mean if they have 42,000 they might be able to take a few of them and create rewards. Over the sky. But anyway, that's quite dystopian. It's kind of like the QR codes that in China they put up with drones. You know, flying QR codes.

Anyway, that's pretty off topic. Basically, I want to just follow the story as it happens in the next couple of years because it's going to happen very quickly. And the fact that just a year or two ago, we only had about 6,000 or 7,000 satellites in space, and now there are 12,000 is just kind of like, well, 12,000 satellites in space and now there are 12,000 is just kind of like well 12,000 have ever been launched there's 7,000 now and they're only like 5,000 a couple years ago and it's just kind of like you said that curve that exponential curve it's just doing that and I'm more companies

like Amazon and Facebook and and OneWeb and all these companies have started saying actually we're going to put a constellation in space actually we're going to do a constellation in 2019 amazon said they were going to put 3236 in space and that got delayed and they're still on track to eventually put them into space but now that starlink is doing 42 000 i have feelings that they're um trying to up that number. So knowing everything that you guys know now, I guess the final question would be, is it worth it? Is it worth it to give internet to everybody for a low cost? And potentially lose some of our astronomy, some of the night sky. As someone in the very privileged position

of having access to internet everywhere I go, I don't need more satellites. But that will not be everyone's position. And you have to think about the, again, 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 would love the idea of, wow, I live in, you know, where did we just drive? We had no internet for like half of the trip we just did for a thousand miles but it would be really nice to just have internet all the time up here in lake placid in the forest when i go camping or something 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 the meteors not being seen at dawn or getting hit by a giant that's just kind of like all right that's the sacrifice they're willing to

make um but from where i sit i think i'm good yeah 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 function just as society much better because there's all these different you know remote islands and places that are just like super remote that can't get it and just like if places like that or you know poorer countries that if they had it it would benefit them immensely and if it were just to take away the fact 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 ultimate aspect of like potentially stuff falling from the sky out of nowhere or like limiting ourselves and

destroying our atmosphere like it's gets way tougher yeah to say that marquez looks like he had i just had a random like a light bulb moment oh airplane wi-fi does it get better with starlight probably marquez is like screw the astronomers put them up you'd probably get better wifi on the airplane than you would on earth because of that inverse square law you've swayed me sorry John

sorry Mr. McDowell that's fascinating I guess one kind of counterpoint is these areas that 40% of the world that doesn't have internet. The rapid change of life and change of quality of life and movement from being third world to second world to first world country

that you get from transfer of information. From my IT classes in college just like researching all the different changes in the speed in which we transfer information and how quickly society developed because of these like exponentially faster ways of transferring information like information is everything it went from you know stone tablets to horse and buggy to the post to email was the biggest freaking change in the way that business in the world operated. And then we have- Way to ignore the printing press.

Yeah, you know, books. Forgot about that part. Forgot about the book part, yeah. The wheel. The wheel. But yeah, it's just these areas could go from being extremely remote to like participating in the global economy yeah and that's 40 it's a very big 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 the world works and i've definitely heard from some people that say like you know can i say screw on a podcast uh screw trying to colonize mars we should be taking care of the planet we have you know and uh you know i think there are multiple sides to that obviously we know that our planet is eventually going to become uninhabitable but that's my favorite neil degrasse tyson anecdote yeah when he's like all right so I heard that in order to populate Mars you first need to terraform it so you drop nukes on the poles and you've like you know you reach you restructure the whole planet and the atmosphere and everything and that's going to take billions of dollars and like all these years but we also already have earth and that's

in pretty good shape we could probably do a little bit better and a 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 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 equalize the playing field for the entire world like that would be pretty amazing as well and this is the fastest 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 world is speeding up exponentially while no one has even able to get the internet the long tail yeah and 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 you know there are positives and negatives. Negative, big negative is when you go to Lake Placida to go camping you're going to be camping under the satellites instead of stars. Yes. There'll be waterfalls and babbling brooks and lots of shooting stars all the time. Shooting satellites. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

So that's a future we're possibly looking at. Sorry to bum you guys out today. This is a fun episode. It's i 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 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 let's uh try to figure out try to find like a happy story you know in the meantime let us know what you think 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 astronomers will be coming out.

I'm sure we'll have lots of valuable input. I mean, we were resident armchair astronomers today. Yeah, yeah. I put on my astronomer hat a little bit there, but we'll have them in the comment section below. So we'll check those out too. In any case, this has been Waveform. Thanks for listening.

Thanks for watching. If you're on the video version. And we'll catch you guys in the next one. Peace. Thanks for hanging out with us today. And special thanks to Emily Zhang, Jonathan McDowell, Jeremy Tregalone-Reed,

Robin Dickey, and Joseph Kohler. We couldn't have done this reporting without you guys. Waveform is produced by Adam Molina. We are partnered with the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our intro outro music is by Vain Sil.