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People Beyond Low Earth Orbit | Countries Leaderboard (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/spaceflightmemes@sh.itjust.works
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Credit: u/mclumber1

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[+] -13 points 7 months ago (13 children)

Other than nifty pictures from the space telescopes, Velcro, and maybe GPS, have we actually gotten anything cool from playing in space? Not sure any of those were worth burning all that rocket fuel.

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  • [–] 13 points 7 months ago (9 children)

    Two big categories:

    Imaging + weather satellites

    Communications satellites

    Those have tons of varirty. Hyperspectral imaging for farming, mining, solar farm maintenance, etc. Wildfire monitoring. Ship and other asset tracking. Remote connectivity for search and rescue and high speed internet to isolated areas.

    I think there's also a ton of potential for future manufacturing and resource collection up there.

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  • [+] -9 points 7 months ago (7 children)

    Yeah, none of these are worth the environmental cost of all the rocket launches.

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    What environmental cost is that? Do you even know, or are you gonna have to google it?

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  • [–] -4 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    No I don't have exact numbers, but nothing that belches out that much fire and smoke is doing anything good for our atmosphere. The progress of man is a sick joke. I await my downvotes smugly

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

    How much fire and smoke is that? How does it compare to, like, one small town's daily car usage? And what is that smoke? Depending on the rocket you're looking at, it could literally be water vapor.

    And what about the tens of thousands of lives these satellites have saved? The information we get from satellites is indispensable for disaster relief. Even just the "nifty pictures" we get would be worth it to help emergency services determine where they're needed most, let alone the wealth of information we can use to determine when, where, and how severely a storm will hit days in advance. There's a reason that deaths from natural disasters have plummeted since we started sending cameras into space.

    You don't have to be dug into an incorrect position. It's better to have been wrong about something than to be wrong about something.

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  • [–] -2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    How many more lives have been wiped out thanks to advanced tracking and deployment possible because of those same satellites? How many more planes can fill the skies, or giant ships fill the seas, both absolutely puking emissions and making the weather more extreme, thanks to GPS. No, I don't think I'm so very wrong here. Fuck the progress of man.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

    How many more lives have been wiped out thanks to advanced tracking and deployment possible because of those same satellites?

    Not a lot. Like, certainly less lives than were taken in wars prior to the advent of space travel. Of course satellites help militaries attack specific targets, but humans are gonna go to war no matter what. It might sound cold and evil, but satellites make for efficient warfare, and efficient warfare reduces civilian casualites.

    But let's not speculate. Let's take a look at wars by death toll. In the top 100 deadliest wars in human history, the ones that have happened since we started launching useful satellites add up to less than half of the death toll of World War Two alone. Combined into one massive superwar, they wouldn't even get the bronze medal. Satellites don't help armies kill more people, they help them kill fewer.

    How many more planes can fill the skies, or giant ships fill the seas

    What does that have to do with satellites? We've been launching boats and planes since long before GPS made navigation even easier than it already was. If you want to blame a technology for that, blame the spring-driven clock. We would have launched these boats and planes with or without GPS.

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