I'm personally more excited that Starlink and its competitors will provide affordable rural internet options for people that have none today.
That's most of my interest in it, and willingness to help beta test. We're rural now (opinions differ, people in Seattle refer to it as "the middle of nowhere," I call it "rural farm country with a very good view into the middle of nowhere"), and will probably remain here for many years to come, if not the remainder of our years, but there's something to be said for a more remote retreat as suburbia heads down our way at an alarming rate, eating up perfectly good farm fields and replacing them with packed in two story hideous boxes for an awful lot more money than they ought to be built and sold for. Super profitable, probably shoddily built, and hideous. So, "progress." Actually affordable housing out in the sticks? Nah, you can't get a developer to do that, you have to do that yourself. McMansions? Sure, have all you want...
Said rural retreat area wouldn't have anything for internet unless we had Starlink, though... at some level, I continue to wonder just how much longer it will remain important. Yes,
everything is moving to the internet, and, yes, an awful lot of people are looking around at the results and wondering if it's really worth it. You'll need some level of access, sure, but... 100Mbit? Gigabit? Ultra low ping connections? Those are useful if you've adjusted your life so that absolutely everything is intermediated by a screen, and everyone does their own thing, on their own devices. Sure, if you've accepted that everyone has their own device, and evenings as a family involve "Two video streams to separate devices, an audio stream or two, a video conference, and online gaming" (everyone doing their own thing on their own devices with their own bandwidth), yeah. 100+Mbit looks like a minimum standard for connectivity. Is that actually the best way to spend time as a family? Well, again, nobody asks that question - and the tech companies interested in you having a ton of money spent on their subscriptions, across the board (device, bandwidth, content, warranty, app rental, etc) sure won't help you ask those questions.
My WISPs, in the evening, go from "decent" to "suck." I've measured our 25/3 below 5/1, and our 5/1 mostly manages it, until it doesn't (in the evenings, 3/0.5 is a thing). And... that's generally been fine, because our way of spending time isn't "each with our own stream." If we're watching something, we watch it as a family. Often enough, we're reading books together, if not as a full family, "all of us old enough to sit and enjoy them." We've recently read through all of Narnia, The Phantom Tollbooth (well worth the read as an adult), and are chewing our way through Wizard of Oz books. Yes, some of them are on e-readers, but a megabyte or two of content lasts us many, many evenings (seriously, ebooks compress). I can't wait until we can dive into denser stuff as the kids get older, and I fully intend to continue this.
Yeah, 100Mbit (on paper... Dishy just delivered 19/6 vs one of our WISP's 7/3.5) is nice, but... does it fundamentally change how we live for the better? Maybe. Mostly in the realm of me being able to self host some more services locally once it's a bit more reliable, and sync data back and forth to my colo'd server more easily, but... enh? We live out in a rural area willingly, and are totally OK with the compromises that come with that - for good and for bad. I'm never going to be a world class fast twitch online game streamer on our connections - which is fine, as I've zero desire at all to even try that. And I'd rather encourage my kids not to go down that route as well, because there's an awful lot more to life than staring at screens. Which, believe me, I do
plenty of. In my solar office. Which has more monitors than I ever dreamed of growing up.
Yes, having some sort of connection even out in the middle of nowhere is nice - and is worth looking into. But it's yet another monthly payment, yet more hardware, and yet more ways for the tech companies to work their claws into places they have no business hooking. IMO. The trope of "city slicker who moves to the country and whines that it's not like the city" is very much a thing out here, and... I mean, yeah. Your car is going to be a bit dusty if you live on a gravel driveway. No, you're probably not going to have gigabit fiber for $20/mo. No, food delivery services don't come here. If you want all that stuff, there's a perfectly good city or near-city area you could have moved to. Yes, you'll hear gunshots - it's hunting season and people are sighting their rifles in. Yes, tractors plow fields at night when it's planting or harvest season. And, yeah, depending on where you live, the crop dusters may be doing pylon turns over your house. I just wish they still flew big radials, I would so much rather be woken by a big radial pounding away than a turbine shrieking... though I also totally understand why they've moved to the turbines.
I agree with a lot of this. Seriously, who would want to live on Mars?
The (increasingly unhinged) "Technoking of Tesla" has expressed a strong interest... No. I'm not kidding.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/03/elon-musk-formally-declares-himself-technoking-of-tesla/It would be like living on the most arid desert on Earth, but at -70 and without much atmosphere. And with the light gravity, you're going to be losing bone mineral density and muscle mass no matter how hard you try to exercise. So you may not be able to come back!
You'd become a near-native Martian! And your kids would be native! Or dead, one of the two. A study of attempts to do self sustaining communities on Earth demonstrates it's hard, and an awful lot harder when you don't have any of the services that Earth's biosphere provides. The Biosphere 2 project was a good case study, but even ignoring that, "Oh, we'll go back to the land and make our own stuff!" communities have a wonderful track record of failure, outside a certain few cases (monasteries and similar communities are about the only one that works, and can you see Musk taking a vow of voluntary poverty?). There are plenty of books on the various Arctic/Antarctic expeditions and how an awful lot of people have died out there - and you can breathe the air and are surrounded by drinkable water, if you can melt it. Mars has none of that. I can't figure out how you look at modern silicon valley technology and say, "Yeah, I trust that stuff with my life." Well, I know how you do it, I just can't...
On the other hand... Have you ever seen the photograph "the pale blue dot"? It's a picture of earth taken by Voyager in 1990 from a distance of about 6.5B km. It really helps me understand just how small and fragile the planet actually is - it's nothing like you see in science fiction movies. So I also think that Elon Musk has a point about trying to deal with the risk of a large meteorite impact - or anything else that affects the whole planet.
Don't get me wrong - I have no objections to launch capability and satellites, as a general concept. I
do have an objection to "let's clutter LEO with as many as we can launch, because they're cheap and we can do it." The sort of thinking that says, "We can; therefore we must!" is increasingly annoying to me. I very much enjoy the space missions, but they're also interesting because they tend a bit more rare than everyday. I have zero objections to the current space programs. I just have some concerns about "Let's make it so cheap anyone who wants can launch their own satellites by the hundreds."
We've launched, as a global civilization, somewhere on the order of 6k satellites, 3k or so of which are still operational - and we've had the occasional near misses with them. SpaceX alone is looking at launching more than that in the next few years, and is looking at 42k or so in the next few decades. Yes, it brings internet services, but it also utterly ruins the night sky for just about anything, assuming that nobody else lobs another 50k or 100k up and they all start playing pinball in the low orbital shells. Or that nobody deliberately triggers the pinball game. Yes, internet is convenient. Is it really worth risking our access to space, in exchange for profits for the world's richest person and associated companies? That's where a lot of my internal conflict over it comes from. Yeah. It's nice for me. It's nice for a lot of people. Is it actually
good for humanity? Well, again, questions not often asked.
And, yes, there's a bit of old man yells at clouds here. I've watched technology after technology be coopted and utterly ruined, mostly for profit - and mostly because there exist no regulations on the commons. I'm coming up on 40 at a good clip, and I remember the days before cell phones, when landlines were used mostly for talking to people you wanted to talk to (telemarketers were a thing, but they had to pay actual humans to do it, and had some restraints on them). I now pay good money for a cell phone service that is almost entirely used by robots who don't even have the respect to answer the damned phone (because there's no scammer available), who exist to try and trick me into signing up for lowering the payments on my extended warranty for my free Medicare brace before I become financially liable for the repairs on my vehicle when the factory warranty is cancelled because there's an arrest warrant out for my Social Secure Number from the Security Administration. And I can pay in iTunes Gift Cards. And, in the deal, the added latency of the cell connections and such makes it far harder to have an actual conversation with a human, because you end up talking over each other because of all the lag. I won't claim a landline was amazing audio quality, but at least it was
consistent. You could have a conversation. Now? Good luck.
The internet, that of it which hasn't turned into a scammer and spammer free-for-all, is now mostly run by a few companies who very, very much value you as a pair of eyeballs for their advertisements, and exist to intermediate your interactions with other people, reordering it for "engagement," injecting personalized advertising (which, in my experience, used to consist heavily of eBay trying to sell me
the thing I just bought a few days ago), and generally ruining the promises and culture of the early internet in exchange for their profits. What's Good For Zuck is Good For Zuck and all. We've gotten it almost everywhere, yes, but outside some quiet backwaters corners (of which this is one of the better ones - as long as the mods are on top of dealing with the endless waves of spammers)... eh. I find myself enjoying life a lot more when I don't have it attached to me.
I don't want to see space go the same way. I don't want bloody space billboards stretched out across the evening sunset, informing me that if I drink this or that fizzy sugar water, women in swimsuits will swarm me. I don't want the night sky ruined by all the satellites streaking horizon to horizon (Starlink, to their credit, is trying to reduce the glare off their units, and I don't expect the next few iterations past them to even try to care - who sees stars, anyway? There's
profit to be had!). And I'm not sure that pushing the "Stream everything, rent everything, entertainment on demand!" culture of the tech industry to the corners of the earth is really that good for humanity.
The claim is made that connectivity is always good, because look what you can learn on the internet. The reality is that most of that doesn't require a lot of bandwidth, but the distractions? Oh, they do. Netflix doesn't even bother with the credits or intros anymore - one episode winds up, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, next! Be the eyeballs. View the content. See the ads. Pay your subscriptions. And the tech industry, at least in the circles I've worked in, is absolutely eating their young. The distractions created have ruined the sort of long form concentration that leads to people who can understand modern tech at a deep level. I've heard complaints from Google's SREs (site reliability engineers - the people who keep stuff running and scaling) that Google Apps for Education killed their hiring pipeline, because universities took down the random collection of servers and student sysadmins who ran them (and made great adaptable candidates for SRE stuff, because they've had years of hands on experience with utterly bizarre systems). They can't find that sort of experience anymore. I've known people who do various weird low leve stuff who point out that finding anyone in the low level spaces under the age of 35-40 is rare - it's just not a thing anymore outside a few weird cases. So, the promises of the internet aside, the reality is a lot less amazing. But, hey, 4k porn on demand, streaming to your watch, is progress, right?
I fear, unfortunately, I've gone more than a bit off the topic of Starlink. But all of this is stuff I've been thinking through over the past months, mostly inspired by Starlink and if I (a) need higher speed, and (b) want higher speed. Obviously I've got one, and I plan to make use of it in my own ways, which don't reflect the bulk of the internet. But it's certainly not endless upsides either.