you can’t see the majority of starlinks with the naked eye, what you’re seeing is either some other constellation or freshly launches starlinks that are still orbit raising. once starlinks are at altitude they actively manage their reflection angles to avoid bouncing light back at earth
Yeah I’ve wanted to build this for ages (and have tried a couple times). The use case is festivals/sporting events and other places where permanent infrastructure doesn’t really exist. The hard part is keeping messages small if you wanna include any of the token tech you’re talking about - probably, a system where your payment for usage is that you be an active relay node is more effective. Something something trust models, ala existing cert signing models.
Wild. I was in my 4th/5th years of college during the pandemic and had an internship writing mission planning tooling for lucy. Felt like either two weeks or ten years, coding on the couch while we were pretty sure the world was ending outside. Bizarre times.
The target market is the same as normal mining, you probably mine platinum. The cost probably only closes with either starship or mining fuel in space.
Musk owns 79% of voting shares of spacex (but yes, only 42% of equity). I guess it depends on your definition of “owns”, but its not unreasonable to say he owns spacex.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if early heat seeking missiles used just a PID controller, since a big part of what makes PID attractive is the ability to implement it with electrical components. Take a pair of IR photodiodes and wire them such that their difference is the error of your PID control, wire the output of the PID to the steering on your missile, and suddenly you have a missile that points at the nearest IR target (on one axis of course).
Modern missiles do better than this, but a missile wired this way with a proximity fuse would hit the target a reasonable amount of the time. Not silly at all if you haven’t invented microcontrollers yet.
The idea is that, because of the risk of a technological explosion, any sentient species is a threat.
I don’t really buy the idea though - cooperation has been the strongest strength of humanity and is one of our greatest evolutionary edges. Why wouldn’t that apply on the interstellar scale too?
This is the biggest storm since 2003! We hit a G5 on the SWPC geomagnetic storm reading, and my team had to power down components on our satellites to keep them safe!
There isn’t really a “why”, other than the need to match observed reality.
We know from observations that light moves at a constant speed, even when the observer is moving near the speed of light, and we know that this observation is true regardless of your frame of reference.
In order for physics to remain consistent while accounting for the constant speed of light, other things need to flex between the two reference frames: namely, time (time dilation) and length (Lorentz contraction).