How would the end of satellite service impact your life?
How would the end of satellite service impact your life?
Lately I have been thinking a bit about how commercial and governmental satellites impact my life, so that I'm mentally prepared for life if they end service. This isn't a doomer post, it's solar punk or whatever. Practical.
The first time I remember interacting with a commercial satellite was in the late 2000s when I got a device with GPS. I don't entirely know how satellites are involved in my current cellphone, but I know it does use them for GPS. Never had sat TV or sat Home Internet.
- The internet would still exist, people would have less access though especially in remote places
- Weather Service would be impacted, I think? But much of that is also done with radar.
- I don't know anything about air traffic control! Does that have satellites?
- Those ugly TV dishes would still be ugly, but maybe they could be ugly spider plant planters or something.
- I don't care about how nations spy on each other, but it's funny to me that would be impacted.
What about your individual experience? What about the world experience am I missing?
*edit 1 Apparently it would mess up crop rotation in a lot of places and environmental monitoring would be broadly impacted.
Which satellites?
Given the distance-squared rule, it's hard to imagine a large disruption to most satellites, particularly the ones on higher orbits.
Cellphones depend very weakly on satellites, just for a rough geolocation estimate and maybe time sync. Otherwise, they depend on cell towers, and are using WiFi hotspot data for precise location. Car navigation could be impacted, in phones that wouldn't support any of the geolocation constellations left.
Internet, 4/5G, and WiFi, are 99.99% terrestrial, even in remote areas.
Weather predictions would definitely get impacted, the terrestrial predictions based on patterns and radar, is what gave us semi-random estimates 40 years ago.
Air traffic is incoporating GPS services, but doesn't fully deprecate VOR, ILS, magnetic, visual, or even celestial navigation.
TV dishes are pointed at geostationary satellite groups, they're far away and hard to impact... except when it's raining or snowing. A good layer of thunderstorm clouds can wreak havoc with Sat TV, both at the emitter and the receiver.
Spy satellites are the least likely to get impacted by anything, they are more likely to have good shielding and weird orbits.
Thanks for this really informative response. The distinctions in altitude was an unknown-unknown for me. I was aware of the concept of "geostationary" but I didn't have the word for it.
If it isn't clear already, I'm under-informed on this technology. As I read about the pollution caused by Space X and others, and as nuclear powers begin weaponizing space, I am trying to understand what the consequences might be.
I guessed you were thinking nukes. They do pose a risk in space, but it's not intuitive to neither understate or overstate it.
A nuke generates a high pressure shockwave, emits a concentrated blast of particles, and an EM pulse:
At LEO, an average sized nuke could wreak havoc with a bunch of satellites, and fry power lines on the ground. Most electronic devices however, have some kind of case shielding them, particularly the most EM sensitive parts like radios. Cell tower antennas would be more exposed, so that could be a problem. Fiber is completely unaffected, so the backbone of internet would go on as usual. Data centers... it would depend; some are built out in the open, others in nuclear shelters.
A more uncertain aspect, would be the impact on Van Allen belts. They're full of highly energetic particles from the Sun, that everyone tries to avoid as much as possible. A longer shift and exposure to a stream of particles, could take down some satellites.
Another aspect to consider, is that fusion explosions have no theoretical upper bound. With the technology we have, it's hard to make them smaller (so the issue with fusion power production), but there is no upper bound, all the way to the Sun and beyond. Someone potentially "could" create a planet killer... but they better be on another planet (or the Moon) when it goes off.
From a "conventional" point of view, placing nukes in orbit has the issue that it shortens delivery times to less than half: instead of "launch, ascent, travel, descent" it becomes a simple "wait until it's in position, descent". Nations might want to preemptively strike that kind of satellites.
For reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime