I'm trying to rage-write an article about all the completely awful, useless, polluting, dangerous shit that companies are proposing to launch into orbit and I can't even tell what's fake and what's real on these fucking techbro websites anymore. It's all so fucking ludicrous.
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tell Bannon he got his 'flooded zone' wish granted.
@sundogplanets
All those you've mentioned!!!
Maybe I've missed some, but these here are very worrying to me as well:
* Kessler Syndrome, cascading damage once a threshold has been triggered, endangering *everyting* in the adjacent orbit(s).
* Impact on the atmosphere and global warming due to aluminium ablation of de-orbiting satellites.
For Big Tech and tech bros, this is all a land grab right now, driven by FOMO and perceived 'street creds' (redeemable in Silicon Valley and with the Tangerine Tyrant).
#satellites #SpaceInsanity #pollution #enshittification #BigTech
We've got all of these 'one trick pony's' or 'to a carpenter Everything looks like a nail'. Each is in this race against the others to get the most without taking the time to see what it does. It's just a great grab to grab a piece of empty space, which is ludicrous & each wants the biggest piece.
@sundogplanets oh I totally agree tech media is mostly just fake news lmao and they're bragging about how "AI is great because it does xyz" or "new AI helps remove all your debt" whatever like no one cares
they are speed walking us to extinction.
@sundogplanets I suppose the rage part should be easy, anyway . . . :-/ The writing part sounds more like work though, and I don't envy you the task of choosing which bits of stupidity to subject yourself to in order to do it!
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@sundogplanets several years ago I jumped to the conclusion that something's mere existence on a techbro website means it's probably horseshit.
In an odd way, we already went through this. Look at tech magazine ads circa 1982. Like, when we still had print magazines.
@sundogplanets Let's build a Ballroom Bunker, that flushes them all down to the bottom of Mariana's Trench!
A fitting depth for those Space Cadets!!
@sundogplanets There comes a point at which we're better off crowdfunding the launch of something *designed* to initiate a LEO Kessler cascade, and I think we're close to it.
@sundogplanets
My observations are:
Money and intellect are at best casually related.
Money and ethics have no correlation.
Space, the oceans, some wormhole to Andromeda. Its a time of unhinged speculation, infinite money, destruction of ground truth and any meaningful discourse.
@sundogplanets it seems like all these space ventures live in the same no-man's-land occupied by stuff like Elon Musk's hyperloop or his brain-chip ambitions: it's hard to tell the degree to which they actually hope to achieve anything substantial vs. have some sort of grand tentpole projects always going, pretexts for hoovering up investment dollars
@sundogplanets
No wonder they are not concerned with AI hallucinations given they themselves hallucinate far more strongly.
@sundogplanets The same tech bros ducking up space and astronomy are also ducking up everything in my industry (open source software), with their thieving AI bullshit generators, covering us in generated manure in vast amounts, while also taking no care of software reliability or security.
It's such a shitshow, which will get worser before it might all fall apart.
Your goat and aurora photos, and everybody else creating fabulous photos and art of nature and animals is what's keeping me going.
@sundogplanets as the t-shirt says 'imaginary gardens with real frogs in them.'
Like this shit: https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/27/meta-inks-deal-for-solar-power-at-night-beamed-from-space/
Don't worry guys, the CEO says you can stare right into the infrared beam and it's totally safe! I trust him, don't you?
(How you transmit usable amounts of power with a beam that's so diffuse that you can look at it I have no fucking idea.)
@sundogplanets @femme_mal No scientist but, infra-red. Wouldn’t that dissipate most of the energy transfer into the atmosphere? Just saying, global warming already folks…
@sundogplanets IIRC the early SPS concepts relied not on beam density but on 365-24-7 power delivery vs. ground-based solar (of course they also relied on NASA's lying-through-their-teeth Shuttle launch cost / frequency projections). There were claims that birds could fly safely through the beam.
Whatever handwavy argument there might have been for SPS during the 1973 oil embargo was rather overtaken by cell efficiency improvements and battery storage, though.
@sundogplanets Somebody was doing coke while reading Gerard O’Neill’s HIGH FRONTIER.
@sundogplanets Genuinely that’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard. 😂
Someday I hope we see serious studies on how having absurd amounts of wealth and influence literally destroys people’s brains.
It's astonishing the ways corporations continue to find ways to damage the Earth.
@sundogplanets My understanding is that this can be done right (safely) -- but no way do I trust Meta to do anything right.
Or this shit: https://www.cnn.com/science/space-forge-factory-semiconductors-spc
I guess factories in orbit are already a thing? Tiny factories, for now. Which then have to drop their precious cargo back through the atmosphere somehow and recover it? How does this make any sense economically at all?
@sundogplanets It sounds like they are trying to produce very high quality seed crystals that are
used as part of the manufacturing process for microelectronics. The seed crystals are much smaller than the wafers. The whole process is very expensive, but you can get a lot of chips per wafer. Often they'll produce a lot of chips per wafer and throw out the bad ones (the result of randomly placed defects on the wafer).
https://waferpro.com/the-czochralski-process-how-waferpro-produces-high-quality-silicon-wafers/
@sundogplanets Orbital factories are at least hypothetically useful. Crystal formation is affected by gravity, which limits manufacturing of a whole class of materials. Microgravity crystal formation allows for more precise process control. Things like silicon nanowafers for computing are basically the most expensive materials by weight of any manufacturable substances on earth, so there is more tolerance for expensive manufacturing processes than any other class of material.
It still doesn't make any sense economically because it's not just building a supremely expensive supply chain for something we already have, it's only worth doing for the development of new materials, which then would have to go through decades of research and product development to design a marketable product that is likely only slightly better than existing products in a few metrics, for orders of magnitude more cost.
@sundogplanets Theoretically, at least, microgravity might allow the production of materials that can’t be made in 1G. I’m pretty sure some small-scale feasibility studies have been done but can’t recall any smashing successes. Your point about the economics is dead-on. The material produced is going to have to be incredibly valuable in its application to be worth it. And yes, it’s a 1970s-80s scifi staple.
@sundogplanets this one only makes sense to me if they think they're selling the output to future space assembly factories. who knows what scifi they've been reading and want to get out ahead of!
These companies remembers me the Panama scndals at the end of 1800:
@sundogplanets I don't know enough about materials science to know if this is true. To me it sounds like hype to draw in investor money.
Or this shit: https://spacedaily.com/sd-n-nasa-backs-interlunes-2028-bid-to-mine-helium-3-from-the-moon/
The Moon's gravity is much weaker than Earth's so it'll be easy to accidentally launch rocks into Moon-escape orbits, making the Earth-Moon trip even more hazardous than it is already. Fun!
@sundogplanets As an environmentalist and hobbyist astronomer, I’m truly baffled by the attitude those companies seem to harbor toward space pollution. It’s just not a concern for them *at all*.
@sundogplanets Well, at least they got through an article about lunar He3 without going off on some fusion energy tangent.
Checking; that grant is for a system to measure volatile gases in lunar regolith in situ.
Nothing about mining the Moon for helium-3.
The media coverage remains appalling.
@michael_w_busch Yeah, the bad journalism is not helping me decide what's real and what's not...
Or THIS shit which is really shit: https://harvardtechnologyreview.com/2025/09/05/the-future-of-energy-unlocking-the-potential-of-space-based-solar-power/
Many companies are looking at different ways to do this (like the stare-into-the-IR-beam company above). All of them have huge safety, tech, and/or feasibility issues.
@sundogplanets I mean, there's just no reason to. So much Goddamn sunlight falls on the planet and we aren't hurting for land to build collectors!
@sundogplanets This stuff is all very bonkers. Do you know of anybody looking at the possible environmental/atmospheric/climate impacts of shooting heat beams at the cooling-side of the Earth?
I would love to see the business case for something like that. Especially given that we can generate solar electricity so easily right here on the ground.
@sleepy62 @sundogplanets for starters the business case is on the moon and Mars. Also it enables solar power during night too.
We already have have solar power at night in the form of storage and grid interconnections.
My point is it is almost certainly going to be cheaper to build out storage and/or high voltage grid interconnect between sunny and not sunny places than it is to build anything remotely financially viable in space.
@sleepy62 @sundogplanets there's also a limit on how much solar power can exist on country like Japan without risking local food production.
In addition out of control climate change might put terrestrial solar plants in risk due to worsening storms and increasing hailstorms.
@sundogplanets
Every time I see those tech boy hallucinations I want to yell at them that combining coke and booze results in serious brain damage.
Saddest part is that they have access to enough money to actually cause real serious harm
But of course nothing beats SpaceX's drunk teenager scifi novel of an FCC filing about how we need AI data centres in orbit to ascend into Kardashev civilization land. Which the FCC took totally seriously, opened for public comment in 4 days (record-short time!) https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-26-113A1.pdf
and the FCC will probably approve despite a couple thousand comments from the public and at least two petitions to deny opposing it. Fuckers.
Money not only corrupts, it also stupefies. In this giddy moment, they can throw a pile of money at the President and then all laws that restrict them just vanish. MoneyBros now think physical and chemical laws can be ignored as well. Anything they imagine will become real, it they just spend money. Or so they assume.
For people who live within the confines of Reality, this is an exasperating era. It's no comfort, but we can look forward to Reality hitting back -- hard.
RE: https://mastodon.social/@sundogplanets/115345346648445621
A million satellites have obvious consequences, but even one can cause huge amounts of damage. Reflect Orbital, possibly simultaneously the most useless and damaging company ever to exist, which I have ranted about many times, and will continue to rant as their FCC filing is also likely to be approved despite a couple thousand comments against it from the general public and at least 2 formal petitions to deny. I really really hate this company a lot.
@sundogplanets
What bothers me, is that in matters which effect all of mankind, like the millions of satellites Starlink wants to shoot into orbit or what Reflect Orbital is trying to do, nobody but the FCC seems to have a say in this.
Shouldn't such things be regulated by a global organization?
I want to see companies that promise to use a handful of well-tested, ethically built, perfectly functioning satellites with decades-long operating lifetimes to do something that benefits the vast majority of humanity. Why can't we have more proposals like that?
Isn't it illegal for companies to consider ethics in their decision-making?
On April 1st 2024, I proposed a crypto scheme to shoot moon dust near the Earth–Sun L1 Lagrange point as a possible climate-change mitigation measure. And to "find" a Warhol, or a whole museum holding six works of art rather.
https://old.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/1bsyqgt/unspentcash_is_an_app_to_create_a_dao_empowered/
@sundogplanets McSpaceJunk They’ve become the slobs of space. Instead of dropping hamburger wrappers all over the place, they scatter the debris of their junk space gear that has no lasting value, but must be replaced, weekly. The planet is now the trash yard, the toilet and the place we all live.
We could have more proposals like that and we will when we get rid of billionaires and their obscenely large net worth as well as the corporations that make that net worth possible.
@sundogplanets <gestures at Hughes Communications>
<gestures at DirecTV>
<gestures at the vultures at SkyTerra>
<gestures at EchoStar>
@sundogplanets Planned obsolescence is rarely not a moneymaker for the planners, and up there was low-earth orbit, minding its own business, not making adolescent-minded billionaires into adolescent-minded trillionaires.
@sundogplanets because cheap crap faster and faster has been the latest craze since the 70's.
- Clothes are crap and don't last for years.
- Kitchen blades are crap, if nothing else the plastic handles or the planned obsolescence side paint starts to crack.
- Home appliances don't last for 20 years and don't have 10 year warranty by default.
The list goes on and on.
Oh. This is orbital enshittification.
Shit.
@sundogplanets In the 2010s everybody got a social media account and now there are no more offline humans to focus your onboarding efforts on. These funds have existed for 30 years by growing cloud services. But now it's just the inert bottom of the ocean where there is no more whale carcass left.
So they try to keep the lights on by absorbing whole large infrastructure sectors. It's not that they have anything useful to offer space. It's that space has government money that is useful to them.
@sundogplanets
🙏🙏🙏 thanks to voice all this out, this topic should raise much more voices and struggles about it. There's so much to do with all the mess being done in this world. Why are we letting multi-billionnaires ruin all our planet and its surroundings?? It's really outrageous that they do it in first hands but why are we so powerless to stop them? Omg, it's so fucked up.
@sundogplanets The FCC's mandate and expertise is in protecting communications, ensuring satellites don't interfere with each other, etc. They have much less expertise in protecting from externalities like the night sky, etc, and it now shows.
@sundogplanets Like, if you asked most people "what is the primary agency that regulates launching things into orbit", almost no one (who doesn't already know) would guess "the FCC".
@mattblaze
Fixed it for you: "The FCC's mandate and expertise is in protecting *the USA's* communications". No one in the rest of the world gave them any mandate.
@sundogplanets
@stib @sundogplanets Well, yes and no. International communications are governed by treaty, and national regulatory agencies are obliged to ensure compliance with them. The FCC does a reasonably good job here as far as I know in this regard. But they simply aren't competent to regulate things that aren't communications, like *space*.
@stib @sundogplanets The problem with these harebrained satellite schemes isn't that they're interfering with international communications (which is what the FCC coordinates), it's that they're interfering with the environment at large..
@mattblaze @sundogplanets in a sane world it’d be an international body.
@technicaladept @sundogplanets It just makes no sense.
@sundogplanets I'm disappointed that one of the "all satellites everywhere all the time" companies hasn't just thrown a bunch of cheap-ish telescopes into orbit and opened them up to you lot.
But then Elon did promise to end world hunger and when the quote arrived he went very quiet and never paid up. It was only ~$6B IIRC, which even at the time was less than 5% of his wealth.
@sundogplanets I have come to the conclusion that the best way to predict what the techbros will propose next is to just read Robert Heinlein’s YA science fiction novels and see what hasn’t been proposed yet. (Because a whole lot of the clearly impossible nonsense seems to be pulled from those books with the occasional misunderstanding of some Asimov or Clarke stories)
@sundogplanets
I guess they used AI to generate the feasibility study.
@sundogplanets They're just gonna put up a space laser or some bullshit like that when they can't get it to work.
@sundogplanets The same energy there as the 'glyphosate is as safe as salt' myth that was perpetuated by Monsanto during the rollout of RoundUp
@camless @sundogplanets Cigarettes are good for pregnant women! It helps keep them calm, and soothes the throat!
