Aug 9, 2026, 4:11 AMI used to be skeptical about harmful starlink was to our night sky, but after spending this summer camping, I have to say that @sundogplanets has a point.
when you do dispersed camping in the middle of nowhere, you can see starlink satellites all over the place moving around with the naked eye.
it is actually kind of distressing. I don't know what to do about it.
Aug 9, 2026, 4:19 AMon one side of it, capital has utterly failed to bring broadband to rural locations in any form
on the other side of it, you can't go more than a few minutes without seeing a starlink fly by now
Aug 9, 2026, 4:41 AM@ariadne with amazon launching their constellation, china launching 2 of their own, russia trying to get one going, the eu probably doing one...
it feels like a thing we can't undo at this point. 😞
Aug 9, 2026, 5:55 PM
The 1% prepares for the militarization of space, fossil fuel funded fascist movements, & a world war.
White supremacists like Musk think they can decide the outcomes of wars, to profit themselves.
https://cepa.org/article/should-elon-musk-decide-who-wins-wars/
Stoking racial tensions is part of his strategy to get rich off human misery.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/elon-musk-race-war-entrepreneur
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/08/ukraine-war-zelensky-trump/688203/
The fossil fuel industry wants control of the remote sensing that records environmental ecocide globally
https://www.thecanadianpressnews.ca/environment/a-pillar-of-environmental-enforcement-is-targeted-by-trump-and-musks-ai-company/article_497d3d7b-0b8f-5a54-bad8-25173f4628f5.html
There is a fossil fuel axis alliance trying to keep the planet addicted to fossil fuels & stop the switch to renewables.
https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/musk-putin-secret-conversations-37e1c187
Musk will take money from anyone, literally anyone, to keep his financially fraudulent house of cards & wealth intact. Ditto Larry Ellison.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/trump-musk-russia-putin
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/28/saudis-kingdom-holding-company-to-maintain-twitter-stake
https://www.businessinsider.com/paramount-wbd-gulf-saudi-financing-abu-dhabi-qatar-ellisons-2026-3
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The fossil fuel undustry funds MAGA technofascists like Musk, Larry Ellison, Sergey Brin, etc.
Solar & wind are cheaper & the oil industry fears a severe price drop in energy price gouging & oil war profiteering.
Peace in Ukraine would drop oil prices. So would a ceasefire with Iran.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/aug/07/flight-travel-costs-iran-war
Hence the Trump attacks on Venezuela, Canada & Greenland.
The energy transition has enormous geopolitical fallout, ... for petrostate despots & oil oligarchs
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https://www.axios.com/2017/12/14/koch-tries-its-hand-at-venture-capital-1513277500
They're getting their money out & laundering it via a tech bubble.
https://www.desmog.com/2024/08/14/project-2025-billionaire-donor-heritage-foundation-donald-trump-jd-vance-charles-koch-peter-coors/
They're also funding far right movements as a delaying action.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/climate/fossil-fuel-executives-stocks-iran.html
https://www.wired.com/story/chevron-williams-driving-data-center-boom/
The oil industry wants to keep its wealth & subsidies
https://environmentaldefence.ca/2026/07/09/new-report-shows-canada-is-the-worst-public-financier-of-fossil-fuels-in-the-g20/
https://www.theenergymix.com/canada-leads-g20-in-fossil-fuel-financing-through-development-banks/
Ukraine's lithium resources were gifted to Trump donor, Ron Lauder, the billionaire who also wants Greenland's oil & minerals.
4/
Lauder retains his lock obstructing the energy transition as long as Ukraine is under attack by Russia & Musk.
Koch Network wants the EU gone & funds the European far right to coerce its EU captive consumers
https://www.desmog.com/2025/01/21/mapped-donald-trump-transatlantic-anti-green-network/
Ron Lauder has long history with Russian oligarchs like Mikhail Fridman & Petr Aven.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gdywpe1qpo
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/following-the-money/
@Npars01 and what your summary? As far as I read, you want Putin to win? Really?
I am intetested in the money behind an ecocide & a global fascist movement, funded by petrostate despots like Putin, #PrinceBonesaw, and Koch Network.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
Letting the most corrupt industry on the planet (and their proxies Ellison, Thiel, Andreessen, & Musk) "win" means over 4 billion people dying.
No. Putin & his psychopathic allies cannot be allowed to do this. The fossil fuel industry must be eliminated as quickly as possible.
1/
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https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-massive-climate-lie-that-will-destroy-human-civilization
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-023-01132-6
The industry must be held accountable & held liable, especially for cleaning up its polluted supersites & wrongful deaths.
https://www.desmog.com/2026/07/29/the-lovelock-papers-shells-hidden-climate-knowledge-under-scrutiny-as-court-battle-looms/
https://www.desmog.com/2026/02/13/bbc-under-fire-for-airing-maga-climate-denial/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/23/republicans-big-oil-climate-lawsuits
https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/5101256-climate-denial-increasing-costs/
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https://www.salon.com/2024/07/31/most-extreme-ever-project-2025-contributors-have-a-history-of/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/may/04/maga-soft-eugenics
Project 2025 is funded by eugenicists who delude themselves that they'll retain their wealth if the global population drops.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jan/16/economic-growth-could-fall-50-over-20-years-from-climate-shocks-say-actuaries
https://www.desmog.com/2025/11/06/why-the-uk-advertising-industry-remains-in-climate-denial/
https://www.desmog.com/2025/09/01/meet-the-canadian-aiding-trumps-insane-war-on-climate-science/
They have to stop funding bullsh*t research like this.
"Achieve Sustainability by Easing Population to 4 Billion by 2200"
@Npars01 sorry, but by mixing enemies, allies, and unrelated into one pot you sound like bot or LLM. 🤷♂️
Either start to think if you are human before writing, or… or you are indeed bot 🤷♂️
I am a real person. I understand the difficulties in understanding complex issues without the necessary background.
Have a good day & blocking & muting.
@ariadne is it capital, or weak government? I'm on holiday in Scotland in the middle of nowhere with 12Mbit/s.
I was out in the high desert, New Mexico...we had to be a hundred miles from any city lights, it was amazing sky...amazing, and the amount of visible satellites is really distracting. The kid who grew up reading her dad's stash of 1950s scifi, it's a thing I thought I wanted, and the ability to bring communications to areas where otherwise it is unreachable is literally world changing for millions of people, but there has to be a better way.
Aug 9, 2026, 6:29 AM@sundogplanets @MissConstrue there is a better way: install 5G towers using public funds in places where capital can't justify them
@ariadne @sundogplanets @MissConstrue the resources spent building multiple redundant 5G networks probably outstrip how much it would take to fill in the coverage holes in many less vast countries
@charlotte @sundogplanets @ariadne
The very real problem is that there is no infrastructure in place that would allow for towers to be a functional alternative.
For example, let's take Colorado. I want fairly remote and treed, but relatively (2hr) access to Co Springs and Denver. Given those parameters, you would start at the NM border, and follow 25 north to about an hour south of Pueblo, and look west of 25. If you go more than about 10 miles from the architecture of the roadway, there is no internet.
When I bought my current place, I paid to laid fiber out here, and then convinced my neighbors to join in. I was less than 1.5 miles from a junction and the price had more than one number in front of a comma. Going up a mountain? No voter would bond it. No county commission would suggest it. It's a mountain without electricity or infrastructure for repairs, like roads built for heavy trucks.
Hence the dominance of sats.
@MissConstrue @sundogplanets @ariadne hence my specifier “in less vast countries”
I’d reckon you could still do a lot better than what the US does if there was one national network with the full channel allocation and the same total budget
@charlotte I mean...maybe, but you still face the issue of infrastructure. There are no roads to places that need communication. At least not roads traversable by equipment trucks.
@MissConstrue @charlotte I still think we could do better with balloons than with satellites. They could be mostly stationary over areas with insufficient infrastructure for towers, but fly back to where there’s infrastructure for maintenance, at lower speeds it wouldn’t need to be as many as satellites, overall they’d be much less costly and disruptive, and lower latency too
I'd never thought of balloons. Have there been tests, that you know of?
@MissConstrue @charlotte the only thing I know of at all is that shortly after Google reorganized as Alphabet they had Project Loon working on the idea. AFAIK they abandoned it without publishing any findings
@charlotte @sundogplanets @MissConstrue @ariadne
One provider, like Ma Bell…?
@PKYo @charlotte @sundogplanets @ariadne To quote Crazy People (a prescient weird 80s movie) ATT, fuck with us and you’ll have no damn phone.
@rodolphe @sundogplanets @ariadne
Corporations unwilling to invest in rural and low income areas is a significant barrier, I will grant. But physical infrastructure is a barrier even when capital is not. Mountains remain mountains, ravines remain difficult, and while most obstacles can be overcome with will and resources, both will and resources come at a cost.
Don't get me wrong, I am not a fan of Starlink, as a company or as sky pollution, but I put it to you that finding a way to make satellites invisible to telescope or human eyes without looking for a particular color spectrum, or something (I don't know how space or telescopes work), some way that allows us to deliver communication capacity to Tibet as easily as we can to Austin, is probably a better use of resources than attempting to scale the Alps or the Rockies to place towers.
Aug 9, 2026, 8:24 AM@rodolphe @sundogplanets @MissConstrue yes. the whole point of going camping in the wilderness is to get *away* from the internet. hence why 5G is a good solution for rural homesteaders: they aren't living in the untamed wilderness. at least, not normally.
@ariadne @sundogplanets @MissConstrue Sort of a telecom version of the Tennessee Valley authority?
@madengineering former Tennessee resident stuck between "yes" and "yikes" here...
@ariadne @sundogplanets @MissConstrue would you like to volunteer to negotiate leasing rights for 5g towers in rural parts of any country - we will call the non profit BillGatesCorona5gFoundation, just for laughs;) we can also offer vaccines, as we will be in remote places a lot;))
@ariadne @sundogplanets @MissConstrue a brief search seems to suggest there's a lot of contractors happy to install fiber optic lines on existing power infrastructure where congestion isn't an issue (if you're in the middle of nowhere, it's probably not an issue)
that's probably where the infrastructure is needed, anyways
well, so long as the funding for that can be found
it sounds like a more reasonable option than 50,000 satellites
@estelle @ariadne @sundogplanets @MissConstrue Almost anything is more reasonable than a bunch of satellites but one of the reasons folks in rural America lack broadband is that running fiber out there is very expensive and, as far as companies are concerned, not worth the cost to do for relatively few potential paying customers.
The U.S. government had grant programs to incentivize this kind of thing but with mixed success.
@MisuseCase @estelle @ariadne @sundogplanets @MissConstrue Here in France we used to have a system named "péréquation", where everybody pays the same, however far they are from the nearest infrastructure. The costs are covered by dividing all costs by the number of subscribers. But ofc this is possible in France where there are not as long distances to cover as there can be in rural north America
@ariadne I was thinking about this recently, and how it felt during the early days of covid when flights stopped and there were no contrails. It was so nice for the sky to seem clean.
No escape night or day now, though. At least the satellites are silent.
@ariadne @sundogplanets @blogdiva completely agree. I was on a boat off the coast of Maine a couple of years ago, and we were marveling at the glorious night sky, and then a row of dots went across and at first it was amazing and then we realized what it was, and it was horrifying.
@constantorbit @ariadne @sundogplanets @blogdiva
"When technology turned falling stars from a wonder to a horror...."
Aug 9, 2026, 4:42 PMWe are in Tucson, which has regs against light pollution - except for drivers and every halogen light being on, of course.
Sitting out back at my sister's on the very-dark east side is annoying at night sometimes because my strong peripherals catch all the dots of light zipping around.
My BIL handed me his phone, opened to an astronomy app that labels all the satellites in real-time as you scan the sky. That was depressing as shit so I handed him the joint and went inside.
@ariadne @midendian @sundogplanets Man, I've even seen them from the Mission in SF :/
"♪♪ They'll take all the stars, and put 'em in a Star Museum, and they'll charge the people twenty-five-a-month to see them... ♪♪"
@ariadne @sundogplanets apropos nothing, how close are we to anarchist model rocket clubs building HARMs that can autonomously home in on Starlinks then boost them into a hyperbolic orbit? (Don't want to blow them up, don't want to de-orbit them.) I know, not close at all. But we can dream...
We continue to underestimate how far the fossil fuel funded tech industry will go to secure its wealth.
To thwart Musk's plans for a fossil fuel funded dystopia & his delusions of a global race war ...
...do all you can to stop using fossil fuels, tech platforms, & AI.
Go after his money.
It is the only thing he & his ilk care about.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/05/13/trump-tech-execs-riyadh/
https://www.justsecurity.org/150631/the-trump-administration-throws-gulf-ai-a-lifeline/
https://newrepublic.com/article/211936/elon-musk-race-war-belfast
https://legionmagazine.com/musk-war-manoeuvres-raise-concerns-over-tech-giants-power/
@ariadne @sundogplanets I was camping once a few years ago and got up to pee in the night. And the night was so cold and dark and the stars were brilliant and I just stood there all alone for a bit in awe of the enormous sky. And then a fucking train of starlink satellites came across and it was like this moment had been desecrated somehow, like even this beautiful moment miles out in the country had been ruined by capitalism
@ariadne @sundogplanets I'm not a telescope or astronomy nerd, but 2 years ago there was a chance I could see the northern lights at and night I was blown away when I had to ask "What's that?" and it turned out to be a string of starlink satellites. Super stoked for when they start using lasers to project KFC ads on the moon.
@ariadne @sundogplanets I just had the same thought last night camping in Wyoming. Satellites all over the sky
@ariadne @sundogplanets I currently live on the outskirts of a small city where they shut down the street lights at midnight. I see those satellites all the time. And I can see how fast their numbers are growing.
Well, I think we'll see a lot of pretty shooting stars when the Kessler Syndrome hits and a lot of debris begins to deorbit. It's a pity we won't be able to start any new satellites, let alone space probes, until it's all over though, and since the ongoing collapse of the Industrial Age will be a lot further along by that time, there might not be any resources left for satellites or space probes.
@ariadne @TimChaffee @sundogplanets It's not just Starlink.
I've been camping in dark places — heck, I even lived in a super dark place for a while — for most of my life. I remember seeing satellites as long as 20 years ago or more.
@mlanger @ariadne @TimChaffee Are you really suggesting there were as many visible satellites 20 years ago as there are now?...
@sundogplanets @ariadne @TimChaffee No, I'm not suggesting there were as many, but I am explaining that satellites in the sky are not new.
@mlanger @ariadne @TimChaffee Ok, just making sure you understand that.
It was actually kind of neat how many people came up to me after my talks in NZ to tell me that they saw Sputnik in orbit (probably actually the rocket body, Sputnik was tiny). We have had satellite in orbit for decades, but only now are there so many that they have changed the night sky worldwide and are now threatening our ability to do astronomy research.
@sundogplanets @ariadne @TimChaffee We used to enjoy spotting them. Now it's too easy
@mlanger @sundogplanets @ariadne @TimChaffee
Yeah I remember seeing the ISS being an exciting thing.
Now satellites feel less like human endeavour and more like the night sky transformation into a manufactured environment.
@ariadne
money in the hands of a few incredibly rich is destroying the world for even more profit.
@sundogplanets @CiaraNi