[HN Gopher] Small, cheap spy satellites mean there's no hiding p...
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Small, cheap spy satellites mean there's no hiding place
Author : known
Score : 315 points
Date : 2021-03-23 10:22 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| humbleMouse wrote:
| There is a limited amount of orbit space and limited amount of
| satellites that can be launched. Building too much infrastructure
| around them is risky and not a good idea for long term stability.
| geuis wrote:
| Where's the article? On mobile it just cuts off at " HawkEye's
| satellites could pinpoint these renegades by listening for faint
| signals emanating from their navigation radars and radio
| communications".
| nfriedly wrote:
| There's a paywall, but you can read the full thing at
| https://archive.is/T8XtA
| xwdv wrote:
| Just go inside a building.
| EGreg wrote:
| Where your gait can be analyzed, and wifi analysis can
| correlate you by your heart beat and other things.
|
| The thing is that after connecting all those databases, an AI
| can quickly figure out where everyone has been and what they're
| up to. And as the Five Eyes shares info, you can ask friendly
| countries to spy on your own citizens.
| xwdv wrote:
| Both can be defeated by a long dress and a bottle of water.
| ZanyProgrammer wrote:
| How will a spy satellite tell me what's going on inside a
| building or underground?
| longsword wrote:
| You can disable the Paywall by disabling JavaScript.
|
| (You can spot it, because the site initially loaded and then
| paywalled itself)
| josefresco wrote:
| Or you could subscribe to the Economist for $189/year.
|
| Learn more about them here:
| https://www.economist.com/news/2020/06/19/frequently-asked-q...
| snypher wrote:
| I'm keeping my $200, thanks.
|
| The current members of the board of directors of The
| Economist Group are: Rupert Pennant-Rea (Chairman), Zanny
| Minton Beddoes (editor-in-chief of The Economist), Lady
| Suzanne Heywood, Brent Hoberman, David Bell, John Elkann,
| Alex Karp, Sir Simon Robertson, Lady Lynn Forester de
| Rothschild, Chris Stibbs and Baroness Jowell.
| josefresco wrote:
| > The current members of the board of directors...
|
| And?
| slowhand09 wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqwzuiSy9y0
| josefresco wrote:
| Is this HN's version of being Rickrolled?
| jpm_sd wrote:
| Or by quickly hitting Esc:
|
| ----------
|
| In the middle of last year, Ecuadorians watched with concern as
| 340 foreign boats, most of them Chinese, fished just outside
| the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) around their country's
| westernmost province, the Galapagos Islands. The law of the sea
| requires such vessels to carry GPS-based automatic
| identification systems (AIS) that broadcast where they are, and
| to keep those systems switched on. Some boats, however, failed
| to comply. There were more than 550 instances of vessels not
| transmitting their locations for over a day. This regular radio
| silence stoked fears that the boats concerned were sneaking
| into Ecuador's waters to plunder its fish.
|
| Both local officials and China's ambassador to Ecuador denied
| this, and said all the boats were sticking to the rules. In
| October, however, HawkEye 360, a satellite operator based in
| Virginia, announced it had detected vessels inside Ecuador's
| EEZ on 14 occasions when the boats in question were not
| transmitting AIS (see map). HawkEye's satellites could pinpoint
| these renegades by listening for faint signals emanating from
| their navigation radars and radio communications.
|
| HawkEye's satellites are so-called smallsats, about the size of
| a large microwave oven. They are therefore cheap to build and
| launch. HawkEye deployed its first cluster, of three of them,
| in 2018. They are now in an orbit that takes them over both of
| Earth's poles. This means that, as the planet revolves beneath
| them, every point on its surface can be monitored at regular
| intervals.
|
| Initially, the data the satellites collected were downloaded to
| a tracking station on Svalbard, a Norwegian island in the
| Arctic Ocean. But business has since boomed. HawkEye now counts
| a dozen governments among its customers, as well as private
| clients. The firm has therefore recruited the services of a
| second ground station, in Antarctica, and it put a second
| cluster into orbit on January 24th. It plans three more such
| launches this year, and also intends to widen its network of
| ground stations yet further.
|
| Given this success, it is hardly surprising that at least six
| other companies are operating or developing similar systems.
| Quilty Analytics, a research firm in Florida, expects the
| number of radio-frequency (RF) intelligence satellites of this
| sort in orbit to multiply from a dozen at the beginning of
| January to more than 60 by the end of next year.
|
| Unmixed signals
|
| RF-intelligence satellites detect where a transmission is
| coming from in two ways. One, trilateration, relies on
| measuring minute differences in a signal's arrival time at each
| member of a cluster. The other uses the Doppler effect--the
| shift in a signal's frequency if the transmitter is moving
| relative to the receiver. Together, according to HawkEye, these
| can pinpoint a signal's source to within 500 metres of its true
| origin. Kleos Space, a Luxembourgeois company that launched its
| first cluster in November and hopes to put two more up later
| this year, says its accuracy ranges between 3,000 and 200
| metres.
|
| A cluster sweeps a band of territory 2,000km wide so, circling
| the planet every 90 minutes or so, it can revisit many areas
| several times a day. Moreover, unlike spy satellites fitted
| with optical cameras, RF satellites can see through clouds.
| Their receivers are not sensitive enough to detect standard
| mobile phones. But they can pick up satellite phones, walkie-
| talkies and all manner of radar. And, while vessels can and do
| illicitly disable their ais, switching off their communications
| gear and the radar they use for navigation and collision-
| avoidance is another matter entirely. "Even pirates don't turn
| those things off," says John Beckner, boss of Horizon
| Technologies, a British firm that plans its first launch in
| August.
|
| RF data are also cheap to collect. Satellites fitted with
| robotic high-resolution cameras are costly. Flying microwave
| ovens that capture and timestamp radio signals are not. Horizon
| says that building, insuring and launching its August mission
| should cost no more than about $1.4m.
|
| America's National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), one of
| that country's numerous spying operations, is a big user of RF
| intelligence. It employs HawkEye's data to find guerrilla camps
| and mobile missile-launchers, and to track both conventional
| warships and unconventional ones, like the weaponised
| speedboats sometimes deployed by Iran. Robert Cardillo, a
| former director of the agency who now advises HawkEye, says
| dozens of navies, Russia's included, spoof AIS signals to make
| warships appear to be in places which they are not. RF
| intelligence is not fooled by this. Mr Cardillo says, too, that
| the tininess of RF satellites makes them hard for an enemy to
| destroy.
|
| Beside matters military, the NGA also uses RF data to unearth
| illicit economic activity--of which unauthorised fishing is
| merely one instance. Outright piracy is another. And the
| technique also works on land. In 2019, for example, it led to
| the discovery of an illegal gold mine being run by a Chinese
| company in a jungle in Gabon. And in 2020 the managers of
| Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo began
| using HawkEye data to spot elephant poachers and dispatch
| rangers to deal with them.
|
| There are commercial uses, too. Andy Bowyer, Kleos's boss,
| reports interest among telecoms firms keen to locate rogue
| transmitters, such as unlicensed ham radios, that are operating
| within their domains. Regulators, meanwhile, would like the
| firm to create "heat maps" of shifting patterns of legitimate
| transmissions. These would help them select sites for mobile-
| phone towers and also give them a better idea of the value in
| particular places of licences to use parts of the radio
| spectrum that are going up for auction. Some charities, too,
| have an interest in Kleos's data. RF information can, for
| example, flag up routes taken by migrants likely to need food
| and other aid.
|
| Declustering
|
| Using satellite clusters to gather RF intelligence is clever.
| But engineers at Unseenlabs, a firm in Rennes, France, reckon
| it is already outdated. At the moment, Unseen has three
| satellites in orbit and sells data to about ten navies,
| including France's, as well as to maritime insurers and a
| handful of big defence contractors. But its satellites operate
| independently, rather than as a cluster, for Unseenlabs'
| engineers have devised a detection system, which they claim is
| accurate to within 5,000 metres, that requires but a single
| satellite.
|
| How this system works remains a secret--and one that, according
| to Clement Galic, Unseenlabs' boss, is protected by the French
| state. After several attempts were made to steal it, he says,
| the defence ministry's Directorate General of Armaments offered
| its assistance in defending the details from cybertheft.
|
| Secret or not, though, Unseenlabs may soon have competitors in
| the single-satellite-RF-intelligence market, for Horizon, too,
| says that it has worked out how to perform the trick--a claim
| backed up by the fact that its launch in August will loft but a
| single device. Shortly after it filed an application for a
| patent in America on the wizardry involved, the government
| there classified it. Even so, Mr Beckner drops a hint. The
| method involves assessing differences in the angles at which a
| target's signals arrive during the satellite's arc across the
| sky. Horizon says its system will be accurate to within 3,000
| metres. By the middle of next year, it, too, plans to operate
| three satellites in different orbits--enough to scan most of
| the planet every two hours or so.
|
| Horizon also plans to compile a library of unique radar-pulse
| "fingerprints" of the world's vessels, for the tiny differences
| in componentry that exist even between examples of the same
| make and model of equipment mean that signals can often be
| linked to a specific device. It will thus be able to determine
| not merely that a vessel of some sort is in a certain place,
| but which vessel it is, and where else it has been.
|
| Unseenlabs, for its part, has already catalogued the radar
| fingerprints of many thousands of vessels, several hundred of
| which have, subsequent to the events of last summer, spent time
| in the Galapagos EEZ with their AIS beacons switched off. It
| remains to be seen what Ecuador's authorities will do with that
| information. But no one can say they weren't told.
| Noxmiles wrote:
| Why is quickly hitting Esc working? It's perfectly working
| and that is strange.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Aborts loading of the page, JS usually comes last - cant
| execute what wasn\t loaded.
| broooder wrote:
| Have you tried the caves?
| LinuxBender wrote:
| and mines. With mines you would already have a good idea of the
| rock composition and layers. I wanted to put a literal "man
| cave" in a mine _by parking an RV in one_ , but I can't find
| any good documentation on restrictions per state on personally
| owned mines vs. claims.
| mhh__ wrote:
| The stories of NRO uniform patches giving away classified
| information never cease to make me chuckle.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| More information here for anyone curious:
|
| https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/satellites/g2728/best...
| simonh wrote:
| This one's my favourite. It's rare you get a good look at some
| of the best classified satellite imagery available anywhere
| (there are some doubts whether this was actually a satellite
| image, but it seems likely).
|
| https://www.npr.org/2019/08/30/755994591/president-trump-twe...
| hooloovoo_zoo wrote:
| Startup idea #42123: Tactical Sombreros
| calibas wrote:
| This isn't a good thing or a bad thing, it's all in how we
| respond.
|
| This could lead to greater transparency, openness, and
| accountability, or it can be abused by a small group of people
| for their own power and profit. Nothing hypothetical about it
| either, both cases are already true.
| idclip wrote:
| Yeha thats gonna get regulated pretty fast.
|
| Israel is VERY uptight about its airspace and the drones here are
| basically sharks with lasers.
|
| Good luck, comrad.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Lots of little cameras up there. Ok. They can see ships. That is
| a far cry from total surveillance. There are countless physical
| limitations that prevent the concept of total space surveillance,
| from lens diameter to the atmosphere's absorption of certain
| frequencies. I remain far more concerned by the cameras in my
| apartment building, or taps on my internet/cell connections, than
| I am about space cameras.
|
| Be more worried about your local police operating airborne camera
| systems. Drones hovering over cities are far far cheaper than any
| space-based surveillance scheme.
| dfilppi wrote:
| Unless they are indoors, no true.
| neilshevlin wrote:
| On a good note, getting access to really high quality Earth
| observation data is really good for geophysics and geoscience
| research.
| rexreed wrote:
| And yet, MH370 is still missing. Yes I know satellites can't see
| under water but the earth can still hide mysteries.
| BelenusMordred wrote:
| Reading about the two nacro subs captured in the last year it's
| pretty clear you don't even need to go deep.
|
| For a long time I was under the impression that diesel subs
| stand out like a sore thumb on sat photos and nation states
| watch them all like hawks, but apparently not and drug cartels
| can just roll around as they please in them.
| CapitalistCartr wrote:
| Diesel subs at 30 meters become nearly invisible. They're
| hell to find. And if they stop, they're really, truly silent.
| The best way to find one is don't lose it in the first place.
| Track it from base it's entire trip.
| BelenusMordred wrote:
| Pardon my layman ignorance on this, but they still need to
| surface pretty often right? And the diesel engines leave a
| distinct signature when they surface to recharge the
| batteries?
|
| Watched countries argue a bit over diesel vs nuclear
| submarines and this is where I've been imprinted with the
| idea that nuclear subs are the only actual true stealth
| subs you can build. I may be wrong here, but the evidence
| seems overwhelming based on usage. Diesel subs are for
| homeland defense purposes and don't worry about the enemy
| knowing their whereabouts, nuclear subs go silent for
| months and everyone is completely clueless as to where they
| actually are.
| CapitalistCartr wrote:
| Yes, diesels have to surface and recharge. Nukes can't be
| completely silent because of the coolant systems. Each
| has it's strengths and weaknesses.
| petre wrote:
| True. But they're stealth enough, can operate with a
| snorkel without completely surfacing and modern li-ion
| battery tech allows them to operate underwater for weeks.
|
| https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-
| ships/a281849...
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _may be wrong here, but the evidence seems overwhelming
| based on usage. Diesel subs are for homeland defense
| purpose_
|
| AIP technology means non-nuclear subs still have lots of
| uses. They can get closer in shore to gather signals
| intelligence or drop off/pick up SF.
| Xylakant wrote:
| Nation states may just not be interested in exposing
| information about their military capabilities for law
| enforcement purposes.
| teddyh wrote:
| This assumes, of course, that nation states would _want_ to
| stop the submarines of drug cartels.
| DVk6dqsfyx5i3ii wrote:
| Judging from this anecdote it seems diesels subs can be
| stealthier than nuclear ones[0].
|
| [0] https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-
| ships/a197847...
| hwillis wrote:
| In many ways its harder to see something through water than
| it is to see it through _rock_. Ground-penetrating microwave
| radar can get through tens of meters of quartz but
| centimeters of water. VLF and ULF penetrate 10-100x farther
| through the ground than through seawater. The frequencies
| that can penetrate more than a few hundred meters of water
| are around the same as the ones powering your lights.
| Antennas at those frequencies are _miles_ long. You need
| special, non-conductive soils and bedrock to make them work.
| In short it 's a real pain in the butt.
|
| After 200 meters the ocean is practically opaque. Objects
| much deeper than that are reflecting a handful of photons.
| Below 500-1000 meters you're talking about photons per second
| at the surface.
|
| Water is one of a quite small number of general radiation
| absorbers. To block alpha/beta/gamma radiation you need pure
| density- more mass per volume to slow down high energy
| particles. You can use heavy atoms like lead or uranium, or
| very densely packed lighter atoms. Neutron radiation is
| different- the actual number of atoms per volume is critical
| to maximizing the number of scattering events. That means you
| use things like polymers- hydrocarbons, so you have as many
| small atoms (hydrogen) in a volume as possible. Water is one
| of the denser liquids, while still being 11% hydrogen by
| mass, vs 14% for pure polyethylene. That makes it quite good.
|
| Even sound isn't great underwater, relatively speaking- being
| a fluid in motion, there's a constantly-changing distortion
| on everything. The thermal conductivity also means thermal
| signatures spread out quickly.
| mr_overalls wrote:
| Water is a poor medium for photons, but a great one for
| sound. That's why the US and other countries surveil the
| seas with linked arrays of underwater microphones, i.e. the
| Integrated Undersea Surveillance System (IUSS).
|
| https://fas.org/irp/program/collect/iuss.htm
| tgtweak wrote:
| Small ones. Additionally, the military intelligence agencies
| with access to spy satellites probably don't care about
| blowing their cover or capabilities discovering makeshift
| drug running submarines.
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| It's probably less about hiding and more about a needle in a
| haystack. Narco subs are small.
| kristianpaul wrote:
| Oh sure, there caves and forests
| partiallypro wrote:
| But they do have a good idea as to the area it's in. It's just
| very difficult to search such a wide area.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| Yes, that's sad. But on the other side it's strange, because I
| did read, from at least one private company, they would have
| every 20 Minutes pictures from the whole earth. And there are
| several of such companys and many government agency who make
| pictures nonstop. So I think there should be a pic from MH370
| somewhere.
| oji0hub wrote:
| There may very well be, but intelligence agencies don't want
| to expose their capabilities.
| ORioN63 wrote:
| Disclaimer: My opinion.
|
| I am fairly sure, no one is taking pictures of the whole
| earth, in 20 minutes intervals in a sufficiently high
| resolution to pick out an airplane. Specially one, flying
| over water.
|
| For reference, ISS at its height ~400km, can see roughly 3%
| of the Earth's surface. This is without any kind of lens.
|
| If someone has any kind of evidence, showing it otherwise, it
| would be great to see.
| [deleted]
| vaguesortof wrote:
| In a few years Blacksky should have a capability close to
| what you're describing
| FractalParadigm wrote:
| Theoretically, if Starlink satellites had cameras of that
| sort of caliber on-board, pointed down with wide enough
| lenses, they could capture the entire planet continuously
| and feed that data back down at close to real-time.
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| Nobody is going to offer evidence otherwise. Here's a quick
| estimate for what you're talking about: the Earth is about
| 500 trillion square meters of surface area. An image where
| each pixel was a meter would be a 500,000 GP (gigapixel)
| image. Even with impressive compression the downlink
| requirements alone are insane, even ignoring all the other
| issues that would have to be worked out.
|
| The bottom line is that nobody is imaging the entire
| surface of the Earth at any useful resolution daily (aside
| from low resolution meteorological satellites). If you want
| to track a plane you have to start with other means to then
| point a camera and take an image.
|
| There is a huge difference between a company that has
| enough satellites in orbit to be able to take an image of -
| _any requested_ area within 20 minutes, and a company that
| can take an image of _all areas on Earth_ every 20 minutes.
| MH370 is very unlikely to be captured in an image by
| coincidence. If there is imagery of it during its last
| flight then it would be because someone knew in advance
| that something was going to happen (it seems unlikely that
| anyone would have known).
| Zenst wrote:
| The whole aspect of facial recognition upon satellites will sure
| open up some messy legal cases in the future I feel.
| duxup wrote:
| Or just another state that you have no legal recourse in doing
| whatever they want.
|
| How is your foreign social credit score anyway?
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| Faces no, as other people have said - except, what about
| integrated systems that combine ground based CCTV with
| satellites, or drones? You might only be able to see someone's
| head and shoulders, but that's good enough to follow them as
| they walk through a crowd, and you can use that to decide which
| CCTV to use. Presuming it's all networked and accessible, but
| that might be the case at some future point.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| I wonder how gait recognition from space would work, if it
| all.
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| Feet would be single pixels if they were visible at all.
| And they don't project much in front or behind when
| walking.
| james-bcn wrote:
| Do you need facial recognition when nearly everyone carries a
| mobile phone?
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| Not to mention RFID is being added to state ID's, driver's
| licenses, and passports.
|
| [1]: https://www.dhs.gov/enhanced-drivers-licenses-what-are-
| they
| gruez wrote:
| You mean the ones that can only be read from a few feet
| away at most, and can be blocked by putting them in easily
| accessible "rfid blocker" wallets?
| deepgrave4 wrote:
| How many people are out buying RFID wallets to protect
| themselves from spy devices they don't know exist?
| walrus01 wrote:
| Unless something dramatic changes in the field of optics,
| lenses and how to deal with atmospheric blur at those
| distances, resolving features smaller than 15-20cm from low
| earth orbit remains a low probability.
|
| Take a look at some youtube videos of a Nikon P1000 at maximum
| zoom looking through ordinary atmosphere at some distance away
| for an example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhQlwKX3LQA
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Presumably, orientation is also an issue - satellites will
| tend see tops of heads more than faces full on.
| jl6 wrote:
| The obvious solution: pivot face-recognition algorithms
| into top-of-head-recognition algorithms.
| yuliyp wrote:
| People can comb their hair quite differently
| IceWreck wrote:
| > Take a look at some youtube videos of a Nikon P1000 at
| maximum zoom looking through ordinary atmosphere at some
| distance away for an example.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhQlwKX3LQA
|
| This is unbelievable.
| giantrobot wrote:
| While that's an impressive zoom, the camera is moving
| _much_ slower relative to the targets (~0km /s) than if it
| were in even a low orbit. It's also imaging people at the
| extent of its zoom at only a few km away. In orbit it would
| be hundreds of km from its targets.
|
| CubeSats and other small satellites can capture useful
| imagery but they're not spy satellites. There's optical
| limits to their capabilities because of their size.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I think the more likely use is supplementing existing facial
| recognition. Recognize a face on a security camera, then be
| able to track their movements out and about after that.
| Before, too, if you store the satellite footage.
|
| https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/christianstork/spy-
| plan..., but at scale.
| walrus01 wrote:
| Pattern of life analysis correlated with ground based
| intelligence, where your car goes, where it usually parks
| in the day and at night, etc. You would need a _lot_ of LEO
| satellites to approach anything like persistent coverage,
| however, current sun synchronous things have very long
| revisit times for any particular site.
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| Also clouds kind of get in the way of anything optical -
| unless it's a drone lower than the cloud level.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Atmospheric distortions are worse when looking horizontally
| though the atmosphere (think marriage on the horizon).
|
| It's also only the bottom few miles of atmosphere that is
| really thick.
|
| Looking vertically from 400km up, there actually isn't too
| much distortion. The limiting factor is making high enough
| quality lenses and getting enough light onto your sensor
| without too much diffraction.
| pintxo wrote:
| But hard to get a face shot from a 90 deg angle, as people
| tend to focus their attention on the ground rather the sky.
| ta988 wrote:
| If you need that you can send a drone though.
| saberdancer wrote:
| You don't need to look from 90 deg angle. Satellites
| often times scan ahead/behind so they don't always scan
| at 90 deg angle.
|
| Look at this image that is probably from a spy satellite.
| It's almost at 45 degree angle.
| https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29634/trump-tweets-
| int...
| pintxo wrote:
| The previous post argued that the influence of the air is
| less severe looking straight down. If we now go back to
| looking at an angle, we are back to square one, the
| problem of distortion due to the amount of air between
| the observer and the observed.
| andreareina wrote:
| If I'm running the numbers right, then using the Hubble's
| maximum theoretic angular resolution of 2.8e-7 rad[1],
| something 400km up would still not resolve features smaller
| than 11.2cm. That's the absolute best, diffraction-limited
| case. Don't know how close we are to that on real-world
| optics.
|
| [1] https://opentextbc.ca/universityphysicsv3openstax/chapt
| er/ci...
| Valgrim wrote:
| There's probably a way to circumvent these limit by using
| multiple satellites working together[1], combining images
| to form a synthetic aperture[2], using an aperture
| mask[3], or a combination of any or all of those.
| Actually I'd be surprised if state-sponsored spy agencies
| were not already using this.
|
| [1]https://hypertelescope.org/project/hypertelescope-
| space/
|
| [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_synthesis
|
| [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_masking_interfe
| rometr...
| mnw21cam wrote:
| Yeah. See https://what-if.xkcd.com/32/ for an existing
| analysis.
| simonh wrote:
| The highest resolution images we know are possible in theory
| max out at around the 10cm level due to atmospheric effects. It
| seems we can get quite close to this with the big spy
| satellites the Hubble Space Telescope was based on. Fortunately
| we have a really great example available to examine.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2019/08/30/755994591/president-trump-twe...
| ramraj07 wrote:
| The "theory max" is not that hardcoded, superresolution is a
| field and we don't know what all they are up to with billions
| to burn. There were reports at some point about high altitude
| drones stationary above cities that can read license plate
| level data (not license plates themselves) at video rates
| over the entire city so who knows!
| baybal2 wrote:
| It's known that the latest spy satellites have some kind of
| folding mirrors, and adaptive optics - things not being sci-
| fi anymore for a few decades at least.
| williesleg wrote:
| Ha! Satellite are so 1950's
| nonameiguess wrote:
| This is fundamentally wrong. I doubt the NGA is actually lying to
| these writers and more likely just not saying anything and
| leaving people to guess, but we have long had the ability to see
| the entire earth and commercial imagery is still a tiny,
| insignificant part of the national geointelligence enterprise
| with capabilities dwarfed by the state-sponsored tech this writer
| doesn't know about. Private companies gaining the ability to
| track vessels that turned off their transponders is cute and all,
| but this is not a new capability by any stretch.
| splistud wrote:
| The significance of the proliferation of such technology is
| that there will actually be people and processes 'watching' the
| screen. To my mind this is fundamentally different than the
| knowledge that a few state actors had the capability but not
| the manpower (or desire) to do so.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Sort of and sort of not. I keep typing up long comments all
| over this post and then deleting them and I better just stay
| away. I'm not at all comfortable pushing the limits of what I
| can actually say without getting in trouble, even if it isn't
| technically classified. If you mean data like this isn't
| already being collected on every vessel on earth and
| accessible from a terminal somewhere, that is incorrect.
| Creating the system that does that was exactly my job five
| years ago. If you mean the Navy largely doesn't care what
| you're doing and isn't really paying attention if you're not
| a drug runner, pirate, or state actor, then yes, that is
| true.
| closetohome wrote:
| Exactly. Focusing on capability gives you a very myopic view
| of the situation. Capabilities are a moving target, with very
| few truly revolutionary leaps between the first film-based
| spy satellites and whatever we've got today.
|
| Proliferation is huge. I can buy a high-resolution satellite
| photo of my neighbor's property _every day_ if I feel like
| spending the money. That 's something that wouldn't have been
| available at any cost a decade or two ago.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| >commercial imagery is still a tiny, insignificant part of the
| national geointelligence enterprise
|
| This is a false statement.
|
| Without getting into things that aren't talked about online, I
| assure you that commercial imagery is regularly used in
| .gov/.mil settings for a variety of purposes. This includes
| gap-filling (both geographically and historically), the ability
| to disseminate product widely without sanitization, etc.
| There's nothing insignificant about its use.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| We may just disagree on what counts as significant for
| whatever reason, but I have had direct access to the resource
| management and capacity planning database of ADF-E and ADF-SW
| showing exactly how many of each geointelligence product was
| created and disseminated and for the RROC this included
| products being created from commercial sources. To me, they
| were not significant, but I understand this is not
| necessarily the case at a tactical level, for many of the
| reasons you're giving here like impracticality of downgrade
| to a classification level that actually allows you to
| disseminate to a forward-deployed commander only cleared for
| Secret.
|
| For MDA specifically, though, we cracked that nut and can
| downgrade to the point we're just giving out pngs with no
| evidence of where they came from.
| williesleg wrote:
| Oh, the economist, this should be good!
| ble wrote:
| Interesting that ships turning off their AIS transponders can
| still be picked up from their radio or naval radar signals from
| orbit.
|
| It seemed a bit extreme that the single satellite RF detection
| and localization technique referenced in the article would get
| classified by the U.S. government -- it's presumably a beamformed
| angle & doppler measurement going into a detection algorithm
| which is aware of the motion of the satellite platform, which is
| cute but not groundbreaking -- but at the same time it's probably
| a very inexpensive technology for space-based surveillance of RF
| emitters, which has obvious national security ramifications.
|
| smallsat = cheap
|
| cheap = affordable for smaller nation states
|
| RF emitters = many military assets
| ImprovedSilence wrote:
| Paywalled?
| Symmetry wrote:
| I listen to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast and they often go into
| open source analysis of North Korean or Saudi or whoever's
| current projects based on finding test sites with pictures from
| this sort of commercial satellite imagery. Recommend if you think
| that sounds interesting.
|
| https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/
| phrotoma wrote:
| That sounds interesting, are there specific episodes you could
| suggest which dig into that topic?
| zerkten wrote:
| Wollo-Ri
| (https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1209730/the-wollo-
| ri...) is one episode, but their descriptions are helpful for
| finding others.
| known wrote:
| https://archive.is/IerJ9
| hnedeotes wrote:
| "One day the magic was finally gone. There was no more wonder.
| What before would make you question what sit beyond the veil, and
| its impossibility in a linear universe, no longer did. Everything
| was catalogued, every inch of soil, wrinkles around the corners
| of your mouth, the reflection on your iris when you were happy,
| or sad, circumstances you found yourself in. All of that had a
| rational thread that could be followed back to the big silent
| eye, data point by data point. There was nothing else to
| question, no possibility of impossibles, of something unseen.
| Just this never ending stream of letters that told you that's all
| there is, all that you are"
| hooande wrote:
| pbronez had some great replies below. I wanted to add that more
| data = more questions. The more we understand, the more we'll
| have to find out and contextualize. There's more to exploration
| than mapping
| npteljes wrote:
| So, why do I like reading a story? It's already written. Yet
| that fact doesn't suck out the joy.
| hnedeotes wrote:
| Unless someone spoils it out before you read it right?
| folmar wrote:
| There is a style of spoiler on the first page, for example
| see Pharaoh by Boleslaw Prus where spoiler is literally the
| first sentence.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Most things worth reading aren't so plot focused that
| merely knowing a bit of information about it destroys the
| value.
| NovaS1X wrote:
| I don't think so. Reading a book or watching a show isn't
| about the fastest route to a conclusion. To borrow a
| phrase: it's the journey, not the destination.
|
| IE: I'm watching The Crown right now. I've been "spoiled"
| on the outcome of the show through simple history and
| cultural knowledge (I'm Canadian). It doesn't make the show
| any less enjoyable when I know that Diana is going to die,
| or that Mountbatten was killed by the IRA.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| There's a different, maybe even better kind of enjoyment
| from surprises (or non spoiled events) in my experience.
| I won't watch any movie trailer or read a review so that
| I go in as uninformed as possible.
| NovaS1X wrote:
| That's fair. There's also some stories/movies that are
| absolutely critical to come into fresh. Shutter Island is
| the first one that comes to mind.
| meepmorp wrote:
| Even if I know the destination well, I often still enjoy
| the trip there.
| npteljes wrote:
| That kills a kind of a fun, but there are still others. Re-
| reading an old favorite for example.
| pbronez wrote:
| This is poetic, but I don't think it's true. The world is too
| complex to model perfectly. It's easy to feel like a digital
| lens is the whole world, but it really, really isn't. Twitter
| != Voters
|
| The small sat revolution is a big deal, but much mystery &
| magic remains.
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| Consider the impact that simply believing the relevant
| portions of the world has been modeled "well enough".
|
| If magic and mystery is the good thing, then simply feeling
| like there's no place you can get to which hasn't been mapped
| might be enough to choke off that feeling, regardless of the
| resolution of the map.
| jrlocke wrote:
| Consider the things beyond this one planet. Surely we're
| simply at an interregnum between two great ages of
| exploration.
| pbronez wrote:
| Absolutely. It's self-fulfilling belief. If you believe
| yourself to be trapped in an exhausted world, then you are.
| It's usually better to choose an abundance mentality.
|
| The idea that the world has been mapped to the point of
| killing all mystery is ludicrous. The Map Is Not The
| Territory[1].
|
| There are mysteries lurking in your own neighborhood that
| you won't notice until you traverse it in a new way. Go for
| a walk with a child or dog. Take a bike instead of a car.
| Use a wheelchair. Volunteer with local advocacy groups.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_rel
| ation
| photojosh wrote:
| > There are mysteries lurking in your own neighborhood
|
| > Take a bike
|
| I do this... and then I map my discoveries in
| OpenStreetMap. I recently discovered OpenInfraMap [0] and
| that inspired me to go find infrastructure that wasn't
| mapped and add it too.
|
| It works a little in reverse for me; I find a random
| thing that isn't mapped well and use it as a motivator to
| go explore it on bike or foot and then map it. I did this
| for a bunch of local creeks... ran along it, fixed up the
| errors, and then added all the individual ways to a
| relation. A lot of places that are accessible by foot
| only often aren't mapped, so I'll go explore a suburb and
| find the unmapped paths that shorten foot routes. Making
| the map better match the territory.
|
| [0] https://openinframap.org/
| test6554 wrote:
| Imagine a world with so much mapped data that it too
| needs explorers. Data recorded generations ago that has
| never been observed by anyone to study it.
| Aerroon wrote:
| We live in such a world. It wouldn't surprise me if most
| security camera footage is never seen by a human.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Additionally, the increase in space access is increasing
| the scope of humanity to well beyond the Earth. It may
| seem ludicrous now, but the same tech that makes cheap
| satellites possible will open up other worlds, in
| particular the Moon and Mars.
| colecut wrote:
| "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For
| knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand,
| while imagination embraces the entire world, and all
| there ever will be to know and understand."
|
| -- Albert Einstein
|
| With a little creativity we should never get bored.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Consider the impact that simply believing the relevant
| portions of the world has been modeled "well enough".
|
| That is dangerous belief to those caught-out by the edge-
| cases, especially seeing how actual humans lazily defer to,
| and others defend "the (application) system": see any HN
| thread on AI bias and/or Tesla Autopilots deficiencies.
| sdht0 wrote:
| I was just reading about the future space missions [0] to
| the outer solar system already planned within the next
| couple of decades.
|
| "Whether it's Dragonfly going to Titan, Clipper going to
| Europa, hopefully a lander going to Europa, hopefully a
| mission that'll fly through the plumes of Enceladus, exo-
| planets going gangbusters, SETI hopefully taking on a
| broader and broader search and surveying those exo-planets.
| Within the next few decades we could potentially answer
| this primordial, age old question of, "Are we alone?" And
| that's gonna revolutionize biology. It's gonna
| revolutionize how we think about our place in the universe.
| And so for all of the pains and agony of trying to operate
| on these time scales, we do live in a beautiful time where
| we might transform the universe in which we live into a
| biological universe."
|
| Along with the commercialization of space travel, I'd say
| there is a sufficiently large part of this universe we are
| yet to "touch" but soon will be able to.
|
| I for one am tremendously excited about the future.
|
| [0] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/04/13
| /92-k...
| holoduke wrote:
| More than 90 percent of all galactic systems are moving
| away from us faster than speed of light. There is no way
| we can ever reach them. The unreachable horizon is
| capturing more and more of what we currently observe.
| https://youtu.be/4iC9Qi3y9q8
| TLightful wrote:
| With respect. The small sat revolution is a load boll@cks.
|
| Forgive me.
| SonicScrub wrote:
| Care to bring up any reasons why you believe the small sat
| revolution is a load of bollocks? I work in this industry,
| and can address questions or concerns that you may have.
| salawat wrote:
| I'll bite. Assume every person put a small satellite into
| orbit, just once. What problems do we have to overcome
| for what payoff? What revolutionary change do we open the
| door to?
|
| Sat launch is at best an Engineering issue at this point.
| More satellites open up avenues for more data collection
| by well heeled interests, additional burdens on
| municipalities when the bloody things deorbit, or worse,
| if they don't. It already obstructs or complicates ground
| based observation and launch/mission planning/tracking,
| and adds excessive risk from debris based on current
| propulsion methods.
|
| It does nothing to advance the State of the Art in manned
| spaceflight (one of the species more pressing
| challenges), and it'll become costlier and costlier to
| get common fuels for rocketry as demand spins down for
| fossil fuels elsewhere.
|
| I just guess I don't see the point in throwing more
| autonomous junk into space beyond the minimum necessary
| to get the job done, or to hyperfocus on any endeavor
| that doesn't eventually culminate in people in space
| self-sustainably.
|
| Maybe I've spent too much time mired in Cost-Benefit
| Analyses recently and it's killed my ability to dream and
| imagine, but I just don't sea more passive satellites
| doing what everything else up there already does, but
| better and with a queue fixing anything; it'd be a boon
| for launch companies I guess, but do you really need to
| be in orbitt to solve half the problems people generally
| throw mini-sats at? I'm not sure the answer is yes.
|
| Love to hear your viewpoint though.
| SonicScrub wrote:
| I think you're downplaying the benefits of more small-
| sats bring to multiple industries and giving too much
| weight to certain negative side-effects.
|
| For starters, let's address some of small-sat
| applications. In you comment you said "I don't see the
| point... beyond the minimum necessary to get the job
| done". What job specifically are you referring to?
| Navigation aids? Communications? Because "the job" that
| can be handled by small-sats has near unlimited scope.
| I'm sure you've already heard about LEO communication
| constellations (such as Starlink) that are bringing
| world-wide communication infrastructure. Communications
| infrastructure is a pre-requisite for industrialization,
| and can greatly assist with providing education to remote
| areas. Both of these have the potential to lift many of
| the global poor out of extreme poverty. Communications
| infrastructure is something that is very easy to take for
| granted living in a developed first world nation, but the
| net benefit it provides to society cannot be understated.
|
| People like to focus on the big extravagant projects
| popularized by eccentric billionaires, but the CubeSat
| space is filled with other valuable applications as well.
| Here are some other industry applications that don't get
| as much time in the spotlight:
|
| - Resource management / surveying (logging, fishing,
| mining etc)
|
| - Poaching / illegal fishing detection and monitoring
|
| - Data collection for weather / climate models
|
| - Extreme weather forecasting / detection
|
| - Forest fire monitoring / detection
|
| - Space-based astronomy
|
| - Agriculture monitoring
|
| The above list won't directly impact your day-to-day like
| the smart-phone revolution did, but that list indirectly
| touches many aspects of our lives. So again, which "job"
| are you referring to "getting the job done"? The list
| above alone (even excluding the comms constellations)
| could easily require 1000s of CubeSats. The interesting
| thing about the CubeSat revolution is that because it's
| so cheap to send something into space, every possible
| niche is being explored as industry scrambles to carve
| out their slice. This comment "but I just don't see more
| passive satellites doing what everything else up there
| already does" is not one at all shared within the
| industry. The CubeSat revolution is doing things that
| have never been done before. And is doing the things that
| had been done previously cheaper, faster, and better.
|
| Now let's talk about the downsides. The space junk and
| Kessler Syndrome problem is typically brought up in the
| context of the CubeSat revolution, but it is largely
| misplaced. CubeSat applications typically require low-
| earth orbit. In low-earth orbit, atmospheric drag is
| sufficiently high that junked satellites de-orbit
| naturally in reasonable time-frames. In addition, placing
| these satellites into such a low orbit does not create
| large amounts of junk during launch/insertion. In
| addition, with space now accessible to more than just
| government agencies, the appropriate regulatory
| frameworks for managing space traffic / space junk are
| being drawn up. The commercial benefits of open,
| accessible space create huge incentives for governments
| to manage these issues.
|
| I also see you are disappointed that the CubeSat
| revolution does nothing to advance manned space-flight. I
| assure you; this is far from true. In the early days of
| space exploration, space was very expensive. People focus
| on launch costs, but it's much more than that. Supply
| chains didn't exist. Nothing was mass manufactured.
| Everything was custom made. This is changing. The space
| economy of scale is ramping up, and government-led "for
| the good of mankind" projects are directly benefiting.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| I swear people watch one highly dramatized movie and
| think we're something in imminent danger of running out
| of space up there. We certainly ain't, and it's not like
| companies don't consider these issues.
| spockz wrote:
| I'm all for learning how to do space flight better and
| getting all the regulations in place and getting
| experience with space launches. The only thing that
| worries me is whether we will end up in some situation
| like we are now with plastics that appear everywhere in
| our food supply chain and are a problem also because the
| unknown unknowns.
|
| Will we still be able to operate society when we rely so
| much on all the services provided by These smaller
| satellites and there is a solar flare. Indeed, what if
| some event does trigger the Kessler Syndrome. Just like
| see radiation from Fukushima show at the us west coast in
| fish.
|
| Will it be too late to do something with all the
| knowledge we have gained?
| SonicScrub wrote:
| With the CubeSats revolution there aren't a lot of
| unknown unknowns. The risks are clear, and the benefits
| far outstrip them. Again, as mentioned above, Kessler
| Syndrome is of little threat in the low earth orbit which
| CubeSats operate in.
|
| I don't really understand the argument that coming to
| rely on CubeSats puts us at risk because they could be
| damaged by a solar flare. And therefore we shouldn't reap
| the benefits of this new technology? That line of
| thinking is like rejecting the advancement of electricity
| because we will be worse-off in the event of a power
| outage. Sure, black-out incidents occur, and sometimes
| (like the recent Texas outage) people are ill-prepared.
| But how is choosing not to pursue electricity because of
| black-out risk the better alternative? Surely benefiting
| from the technology in the far more common scenario of
| normal operation is better than not having it at all.
| mrzimmerman wrote:
| Do you mind elaborating?
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| Like how do you make friends who can pay to put one into
| orbit? Last I checked it was 100K.
| unchocked wrote:
| Indeed. I suspect it's generally true that the more you know,
| the more questions you have.
| [deleted]
| kilroy123 wrote:
| Sadly, I've felt this many times while traveling the world.
|
| There's no place to "discover". Anywhere you go, tons of others
| have been there before you. You can easily look up pictures on
| Instagram or wherever.
| gen220 wrote:
| You might find this reading interesting:
| https://rolfpotts.com/walker-percys-loss-creature/
|
| In a nutshell, you can intentionally choose to prevent
| others' perception of a place from spoiling your own. One
| step further, you can even use their perception to enhance
| your own experience.
|
| You're standing in a place that your extremely distant
| ancestors and cousins once stood, in a place where your
| nieces and nephews and children might one day stand. You're
| connected to the narrative of humanity.
|
| The concept of "first" is a red herring in the narrative of
| humanity. It carries a lot less meaning than our current
| culture leads us to believe.
| qntmfred wrote:
| there's a highway interchange near my house with wooded area
| between the entrance ramp and the highway about a half mile
| long until they converge. every time I drive that stretch I
| wonder to myself when was the last time a person spent any
| significant time getting to know that plot of Earth.
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/@35.8139424,-78.7400188,3a,75y,1.
| ..
| pmlnr wrote:
| > There's no place to "discover".
|
| hm. Here's a story: on our second visit to China, one of the
| main targets was Mount Emei, which is a well-known tourist
| hotspot. On the top, because of the buses and cable cars,
| there were probably thousands of people - we couldn't see due
| to the ridiculously thick fog.
|
| And then we started to walk down. The shortest path down on
| foot is ~50km stairs. We met roughly 10 people, including the
| monks in the monastery we had to sleep midway.
|
| Had there been people there before? Yes. Is it secluded? Yes.
| Did it feel like a discovery? Yes. And I'd even count it as a
| spiritual experience, despite the fact that we never really
| left the civilization.
|
| Another story: when we were in Uppsala, Sweden, we visited a
| place called Norra Lunsen. The young lady in the ticket
| office literally asked as why do we want to go to the middle
| of nowhere - and indeed, we met a single person there.
|
| The point to "discover" at our current stage of evolution -
| in the sense of we can't yet travel across star systems or
| galaxies - is not to go to places where no human has been
| before, but to find places that give YOU a new experience.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I lived in Uppsala for 10 years. Never heard of Norra
| Lunsen.
| pmlnr wrote:
| https://www.uppsala.se/kultur-och-fritid/natur-parker-
| och-fr...
| ehosca wrote:
| the 4/5ths is calling... https://www.bbc.com/news/science-
| environment-53119686
| browningstreet wrote:
| Not sure I agree at all.
|
| I like to go to places and rent an apartment for a few weeks.
| Then discover your neighborhood. It's fun when you move, and
| it's also fun when you vacation this way.
|
| That said, I'm not out trying to discover a previously
| undiscovered waterfall.
| adflux wrote:
| You have visited the wrong places, then.
|
| Plenty of truly "unexplored" territory in e.g. the Amazon.
| You can go off the beaten path if you choose.
| hnedeotes wrote:
| "Wherever you go, there you are" - Dude
| hindsightbias wrote:
| - Buckaroo Banzai, 1984
|
| - Hazelton Collegian, 1955
|
| - Thomas a Kempis, 1400 AD
|
| https://panewsarchive.psu.edu/lccn/2018264052/1955-03-04/ed
| -...
|
| https://www.figmentfly.com/bb/popculture4.html
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| There are a lot of places in Siberia or Antarctica where no
| man has ever been closer than 10km. You are welcome to visit.
| But the trick is, there is nothing of real interest there. No
| old temples (if there is a temple, you are certainly not
| first there), no sculptures, no food or lodging. Being first
| to discover some exotic island in the Pacific sounds
| romantic, but in the reality it is far less glamorous. Just
| rocks, trees, maybe some sand. The main object of travel are
| people and other cultures, and this is the only meaningful
| discovery one can make.
| pomian wrote:
| Except for discovery of self. If you are fortunate to get
| to a spot where no "man" has trod, you can feel it. A
| feeling of amazement, a surreal loneliness. It is awesome.
| Are you afraid? Alone? Teeming world is just, over there.
| Yet here are no ghosts. Empty of human soul. But, rich in
| nature's soul. Wonderful, contemplative experience.
| nradov wrote:
| Some of my friends explore underwater caves. This is one of
| the only remaining ways that an ordinary middle class person
| can discover places that literally no one else has ever been.
| qchris wrote:
| I absolutely agree that cave diving is a way to get where
| people have never been before, and to explore the
| extraordinary.
|
| But to remark on those people as "ordinary middle class" is
| a bit misleading. I'd probably lean more towards
| "extraordinary, and possibly middle class." Otherwise, I
| think the appropriate label for any normal person doing
| cave diving explorations is "dead."
|
| (Not serious criticism, hopefully you read in a playful
| tone)
| OnACoffeeBreak wrote:
| But the others were not there when you're there and certainly
| not with your state of mind. The world is not static and
| neither are you, which presents infinite possibilities for
| unique experiences and perceptions.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| That's just so not true.
|
| Few people are capable of *real* exploring anyway. Going
| where no human has been before. Shackleton, Amundsen,
| Mallory, Harrer, Bonatti, to name a few Euro-centric ones,
| did so. To do what they did at that time was extraordinary
| and way beyond any if our capabilities.
|
| And what Insta calls an "Adventure" is merely a tightly
| controlled and carefully crafted theme park visit. It's a
| joke.
|
| That said, any place is there for you to discover. Nobody
| fucking cares if you visited the Grand Canyon or some fiery
| hole in Iceland. And even less so if it has been trodden on
| by humans yet.
|
| All that matters is having a jolly time in an alien place,
| detached from anybody's expectations. Don't chase the next
| Insta spot.
|
| Go early in the morning. Go in bad weather. Go off-season.
| Take your time and the rest will reveal itself.
|
| It's not that hard.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| I'm actually quite the opposite.
|
| With every day bringing more and more construction. Tearing
| down of historically important buildings for new contemporary
| condos and gentrification - cities have lost their soul to
| me. Its not there's nothing new to discover, for me, its the
| replacement of places people once _wanted_ to go to.
|
| I actively seek out abandoned places now. I try and think
| about what it was like when it was new, people bustling
| about. Or that abandoned mansion. How did those people live?
| Can I imagine what it was like to live in a huge house like
| that?
|
| We have such a disposable culture now - architecture
| included, it has prompted me with a sense of nostalgia to
| seek out what has been left behind and why.
|
| Vice did an incredible job in their series "Abandoned":
| https://vimeo.com/182703618
| michael1999 wrote:
| New Zealand and Hawaii are the most recent human settlements,
| and those were more than 500 years ago. Anywhere else has
| been home for somebody for millennia. You can't "discover"
| somebody's home, but you can discover the creek around the
| corner.
| kaiwen1 wrote:
| I often travel without a guidebook. To discover a temple
| without a guidebook, and without having seen single source of
| information on the location around it, that is real
| discovery. Everything is unexpected, including finding that
| temple. If you take this approach, you will inevitably depart
| having missed many of the places listed in guidebooks. But so
| too did the discoverers of the past who had no guidebooks.
| You can't have it both ways. My advice is to forget the buck
| lists. Just go experience a place. Stay awhile. Discover it
| for yourself. And if you do have guidebook, travel to places
| not mentioned. Far from having "no place to discover", the
| world still has every place to discover.
| ttfxxcc wrote:
| This post is hilarious. You clearly have not gone exploring
| if you limit yourself to what some travel guide tells you.
| matonias wrote:
| Experiencing a place is by far not comparable then just
| looking at a picture. A picture teaches you one thing, an
| experience 1000.
| rjsw wrote:
| You could choose to visit a "place" that has a different
| reason for being significant [1].
|
| [1] http://confluence.org/
| superzamp wrote:
| Quoted from you, just now?
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| I just pasted it into my futureculture novel I'm going to not
| finish in a decade or so.
| dandellion wrote:
| It could even be one of those gpt3-generated replies. It's
| getting hard to tell these days...
| mejutoco wrote:
| This is a very interesting quote, thanks. If I understand
| correctly, Even if a lot more data is available, because of
| chaotic systems this causality of events cannot become totally
| deterministic. Otherwise we could predict the weather
| perfectly. I find it comforting, somebody else might too :)
| mckirk wrote:
| What is the source of that quote?
| dandellion wrote:
| I don't know the source, but it made me think of Gattaca. I
| should probably re-watch it.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Do you often recite paragraph length quotes without knowing
| the source? Am I being gullible?
|
| What a fascinating reply.
| dandellion wrote:
| I'm not the one who posted the paragraph, I don't know if
| it's a quote from somewhere or something the grandparent
| came up with, sorry.
| zeepzeep wrote:
| Check the username...
| ALittleLight wrote:
| What's ironic is that the person who posted the quote
| actually can't remember where it's from, their comment
| saying so is, at this writing, one comment down.
| hnedeotes wrote:
| Can't remember where I read it.
| adamdusty wrote:
| Google turns up nothing on anything from that quote.
| otikik wrote:
| Nah.
| birriel wrote:
| My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than
| we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. -J.B.S. Haldane
| jxramos wrote:
| in other words no space for mysteries here.
| csteubs wrote:
| Revisit is getting better and satellites have an edge when it
| comes to total coverage of the earth, but the 120,000 flights
| around the world each day typically fly predictable routes at low
| altitudes near urban centers (takeoff and landing). This presents
| a massive opportunity to leverage all of that "free energy" and
| use aircraft for earth observation. Coverage can be supplemented
| with satellites, but revisit of aircraft is far greater for many
| terrestrial locations.
|
| 2x/day revisit for most of the world is probably sufficient for
| the majority of use cases, but that assumes good weather (for
| images). On the other hand, LAX for example sees hundreds of
| takeoffs and landings each day, so if you were interested in
| modeling retail foot traffic by parking lot volume, pace of urban
| development, rate of containers moving in and out of port, etc.
| you could get a massive boost in temporal resolution using
| aircraft and far cheaper than launching + maintaining a satellite
| constellation.
| edrxty wrote:
| Maybe, but aircraft tend to follow much stricter paths than one
| would normally believe. Particularly around urban centers
| (airports) they queue up and only really fly a few routes
| through the area. On clear nights you can often see the lines
| of nav and landing lights forming as aircraft approach the
| city.
| WhyKill wrote:
| Underground. Under the sea. Under the ground under the sea.
| Pfffft. The sun was already trying to kill you that's why living
| underground is smart anyway. Frankly there should be no
| expectation of privacy for things you can observe from space...
| GnarfGnarf wrote:
| Kessler syndrome here we come:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
| EGreg wrote:
| Human manufacturing seems to pollute everything. Plastic in the
| bodies of water etc.
|
| It's the tragedy of the unmanaged commons! People don't care
| about exponential growth issues until it's a few seconds to
| midnight. Except in the case of Kessler syndrome, it's even
| worse because it grows AFTER you stopped.
|
| Bitcoin mining electricity use is another big example.
| ansible wrote:
| I am worried about many things. And I think we are already in
| serious trouble with regards to pollution and climate change.
|
| For this one thing, spy satellites in low Earth orbit, I am not
| so worried. Without active re-boosts, these orbits tend to
| degrade quickly, and the junk gets dragged out on a relatively
| quick timescale.
|
| Medium orbits, however, can last a super long time, and junk up
| there is a very serious concern.
|
| BTW, as the average global temperature rises, the atmosphere
| expands, which will degrade the orbits of the lower satellites
| even quicker!
| Symmetry wrote:
| A lot of these are in orbits as low as possible to maximize
| resolution. Orbital debris is less of a concern there because
| it tends to de-orbit quickly. In contrast to SSO where debris
| stick around like with that NOAA satellite just broke up.
|
| https://spacenews.com/decommissioned-noaa-weather-satellite-...
| ble wrote:
| I see a few comments where people refer exclusively to satellite
| imagery despite the fact that this story is about RF-detection
| satellites.
|
| Has Hacker News ever flirted with a "commenter did not read the
| linked story / page but is pretending they did" vote feature?
| There's obviously room for abuse even if it were limited to
| "reputable" users but I would use it on some comments on this
| item.
| cj wrote:
| From HN guidelines:
|
| > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did
| you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened
| to "The article mentions that."
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| simlevesque wrote:
| Those of us with over 500 karma can and do downvote. But right
| now you can try to explain to them that they are wrong.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I think that for a lot of regular commenters, it's more about
| the discussion than the article that started it. Fealty to the
| original content is secondary to conversation.
| ble wrote:
| I suppose you're right, though I'd call it less "fealty" and
| more "relevance".
|
| In this case, it looks like the discussion in the comments
| flies to a subject that people feel they have familiarity
| with (satellite imagery) instead of what is actually
| contained in the article (satellite RF detection) and thus
| the conversation on the article strongly suggests that the
| community is _not_ assimilating any information from the
| article.
|
| I suppose I should be the "candle" and just talk about RF
| detection rather than "cursing the darkness".
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Is there a good history of spy satellites anywhere? It ought to
| be amazing - I remember watching Ice Station Zebra as a kid,
| where super-spies fought to the death over a canister of film,
| and now Google gives away better resolution photos.
|
| The US downgraded moon photos to prevent Russians getting an idea
| of the quality, Russian subs were analysed with one photo and a
| scratch on the titanium plating. It would be great to see that
| playing out - technology, analysis and politics shown together.
| e12e wrote:
| You might find the fictional novel "Zenith Angle" by Bruce
| Sterling entertaining as well.
| arethuza wrote:
| I had assumed that US missile infrastructure would be hidden in
| Google Maps, but apparently not:
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/07/31/336847318...
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Presumably for any military capability the US has that's well
| known about, they probably have a backup plan less well known
| about.
| nindalf wrote:
| I believe some US military bases are hidden on Google Maps.
| But it's not an issue if you're trying to find them. You can
| derive their location from soldiers doing laps around the
| base and uploading their run data to Strava.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-
| tracki...
| swiley wrote:
| That would require publishing a set of polygons covering all
| of it: literally a directory. I'm not sure that's a great
| idea.
| implements wrote:
| There's a treasure trove of related material on YouTube:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=minuteman+missi.
| ..
| cronix wrote:
| My dad was a Capt. in the USAF in the mid 60's. He was
| stationed at Minot AFB, ND., and launched a new test
| Minuteman, but of course he didn't know it was a test at
| the time he and his partner were ordered to turn their keys
| during the height of the cold war with the Soviet Union. I
| have a plaque with the key he turned (the teeth were filed
| off though) along with a poster-sized color photo of the
| missile coming out of the ground and his issued 38 special
| S&W revolver. Since he was locked away underground with 1
| other person for days at a time with no contact with the
| outside world, I was wondering why they had guns. He said
| it was in case your partner didn't turn their key after
| ordered to do so...
|
| One thing he got a kick of before he passed away, was using
| google earth to check out the old base. He was surprised at
| how much you could see.
| neolog wrote:
| Seems like that would reduce the effectiveness of having
| two keys?
| panzagl wrote:
| Why not Minot?
| elzbardico wrote:
| This is due to arms control treaties. The ICBM bases and
| other critical infrastructures can't be hidden, because the
| other side needs to be able to verify with their own eyes
| that you're complying with your part of the treaty, and vice-
| versa.
| arethuza wrote:
| As the Russian saying goes: _Trust, but verify_
| CabSauce wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=scott+manley+sp...
|
| Scott Manley does great, approachable space videos and has done
| a few on spy satellites.
| crmd wrote:
| Scott's content is great. He's my second favorite[1] Scottish
| technology YouTube channel.
|
| [1] https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCtM5z2gkrGRuWd0JQMx76qA
| black6 wrote:
| You gotta do some digging through the archives at The Space
| Review[0], but Dwayne Day has some outstanding articles over
| there on NRO projects. Keywords to look for are HEXAGON and
| NRO.
|
| 0: https://www.thespacereview.com/archive.html
| haldora wrote:
| The nonfiction book Into the Black by Rowland White has a
| portion about the Space Shuttle's use launching NRO satellites.
| This is a fascinating use of the shuttle not many talk about.
| pjmorris wrote:
| It's about rocketry, but it winds up touching on spy satellites
| more than i expected: 'This New Ocean', Burrows.
| intrasight wrote:
| Very excited to hear that they'll be able to track these bad
| actors who are damaging the commons. Also VERY cool that they can
| discriminate and therefore identify ships based on small
| variations in the electronics even for a specific model of radio.
| Also - curious how the French govt is going to keep this tech
| under wraps.
| edrxty wrote:
| The author is a lay person, they're just trying to report what
| they've been told. In reality, single satellite detection with
| the described resolution is extremely simple and the tech has
| been flying since the 60s. There isn't a lot of magic new tech
| in RF, just advances in processing.
| angry_octet wrote:
| I wouldn't say that, track before detect for example. Also
| multiple antenna synthetic aperture systems are almost magic.
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