[SiempreViernes]

They've done a bit, enough that the public won't be severely affected. But as it stands: no, the techbros will simply kill large parts of ground based astronomy to stream gifs to rural California.

Astronomers are not very happy about it http://astronomersappeal.wordpress.com/2020/01/09/astronomer... but so far there is mostly resignation that big tech will indeed destroy the sky.

[pharke]

I think everyone making these comments is going to be eating their words in about 10 years when orbital telescopes are so cheap and plentiful that even third grade classrooms will be booking time for observations.

[runarberg]

A comment below explained that we don’t have the technical capabilities to launch a 30 meters diameter telescope in orbit. And we’ll probably not have that capability in 10 years either. The extremely large telescope being build in the Atacama desert is almost 40 meters in diameter.

Sure maybe it can be fun for a third grader to look into images made for them by a cheep satellite telescope, but professional astronomers will continue to need the larger telescopes that remain technologically impossible to lunch into space for the next decade, or few.

[SiempreViernes]

Will you also claim that cheaper transistors will lead to more compilers? Because that's the sort of thing you just claimed.

[mr_toad]

Every phone on the planet has at least one compiler built in.

[SiempreViernes]

So you measure the number of programs by the number of binary copies?

[jholman]

Without wanting to get involved in the purpose of your rhetorical question (the purpose being some kind of analogy to the StarLink situation)...

How many compilers were there back in the 60s? By codebase or by install count, your choice. Hundreds of codebases and tens of thousands of installs?

How about now? Tens of thousands of codebases and billions of installs?

Do you think this could have happened without lowering the cost of transistors pretty hugely? (circa 3e7-fold price decrease in 50 years)

Seems to me that lowering the cost of transistors DOES increase the number of compilers, whether by counting the number of distinct codebases, or by counting number of users, or counting number of installed copies, or number of times executed, or whatever.

[maccam94]

Here's the logic: If space launches are expensive, you spend more on your satellite to make it worthwhile. Give it more features, etc. Then spend even more to make it extremely reliable, because replacing it would also be expensive (both the launch and the hardware itself). If launches are cheap and routine, you can just launch a cheap simple satellite for each type of sensor you want, and even if it fails you can launch backups (or just activate stand-bys already in orbit). You can even aggregate the sensor data from a swarm of smaller satellites to generate the view of a single large virtual telescope, potentially bigger than anything you could construct on the ground.

[pharke]

Right, plus when launches are cheap and routine we can actually start assembling larger scale projects in orbit.

[TomMarius]

I'm sure you know rural California is not the only place without stable and fast internet access. And while that is one usage that will probably dominate in the developed world, have you considered the possibilities in Africa, Asia and the oceans?