I've got family coming to visit today (YAY) but that means I need to do a whole bunch of cleaning and organizing, including freezing/dehydrating a bunch of veggies I picked yesterday, I need to send off 2 letters for review for the American Astronomical Society to officially comment on stupid things that are proposed to happen in orbit, do a little bit of writing, and the goats are insistent that I need to move the fence to new grass today.
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@sundogplanets I would definitely start with the goats, they look indeed very insistent!
@sundogplanets It looks like mutiny.
I tried making a plot to sort of demonstrate crowding in orbit that would be caused by the 5 companies that have now asked for tens to hundreds of thousands of satellites on sun-synchronous terminator orbits. I wanted to show equator-to-pole, but there's so damn many satellites in all of these I had to show a narrower range of angles in order for the points to not all run together. Anyway... here's what the techbros want for us in Earth's new rings they want to construct
@sundogplanets they're turning earth into Pig Pen (as in the Charles Schulz Peanuts comic strip character)
And a reminder that we ran some simulations of what these "orbital data center" megaconstellations would look like in the night sky: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.02757
And Hugh Lewis recently ran simulations showing that many of these proposed megaconstellations would cause Kessler Syndrome *by themselves* even with the most generous possible assumptions: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.29644
Techbros are awful, example 1795034
@sundogplanets It bears nothing that none of this will sway the techbros themselves & many of their believers, who think having man-made rings & massive plumes of light in the night sky would be cool, because they don't understand what it means beyond "Scene from a movie".
Still important work; we need to stop decisionmakers from letting Them™️ swaddle their sci-fi fabulations in plausible-sounding nonsense & having the facts will certainly help.
@sundogplanets The goats look like they are organizing their protest. O_o
