[HN Gopher] What animals see in the stars, and what they stand t...
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What animals see in the stars, and what they stand to lose
Author : benbreen
Score : 62 points
Date : 2021-07-30 04:08 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Wolves Howell at the moon. Take a dog hiking in the mountains,
| and see it just stop and stare at the surroundings.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| I don't get how starlink can be cheaper than just putting
| transmitters on existing radio masts.
| ska wrote:
| Doesn't really matter if it's cheaper if there are enough
| barriers to scaling on masts (e.g. who owns the rights to each
| one?). It's plausible that would be a very different company in
| basically every way that matters. Sometimes it's not about
| what's cheaper, so much as what's you have a method to do at
| all.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Line of sight is a major issue and getting masts within line of
| sight of all customers Starlink is targeting would be very
| expensive. Not just masts, but all the new fiber to connect
| them.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| Does Starlink actually harm animal navigation through stars? I
| thought the issue at hand were light pollution.
|
| Actually, I got around the paywall[0] and ctrl+f starlink
| returns 0 results.
|
| [0] https://www.printfriendly.com/p/g/3wNvrw
| yks wrote:
| I still think that the primary problem Starlink "solves" is the
| regulatory capture in the US. It baffles me that laying fiber
| cables everywhere is so expensive/impossible that literally
| launching things into space is the more cost-effective
| solution.
| Retric wrote:
| For a single town it's cheaper to wire up a single tower, but
| everyone wants internet and for global coverage satellites
| require vastly less infrastructure. The major reasons are
| launch costs, small satellites, economy's of scale, large
| coverage area, minimal need for spectrum, and leveraging
| existing networks.
|
| First their launch costs are quite low at a small fraction of
| historical prices. Small satellites means they get economy of
| scale and fit several per launch. Being in the sky they get
| coverage of valleys for free, thus large coverage area means
| the little bandwidth is wasted as you can still communicate
| with satellites over the ocean, or low population areas like
| deserts.Spectrum, a point to point connection can reuse the
| same frequency while talking to every satellite in the sky. And
| finally it's more than just radio masts they avoid maintaining
| long redundant fiber fiber connections to each mast by locating
| down stations in convenient locations. Also, after global
| coverage you get better than linear increases in bandwidth from
| linear increases in the number of satellites as you can focus
| on the most useful orbits.
|
| Net, result it's much cheaper to get global coverage this way
| than buy spectrum in every country, rent cell towers, and built
| and maintain fiber connections to each of them.
| lalos wrote:
| Semi-related: Most humans stopped valuing the stars after
| mechanical clocks were invented. That led us to follow the
| abstract time rather than the sun, seasons and therefore the
| stars. That combined with cities with light pollution, makes you
| realize we're one of the first batches of humans with almost no
| contact with the stars.
| lwigo wrote:
| Sailors still rely(ied) on stars even with chronometers but I
| get the point you're making. "Head west for 8 weeks" wasn't
| quite enough.
| reaperducer wrote:
| I started re-valuing the stars maybe ten years ago, when I got
| in the habit of checking the mailbox at night when my wife got
| home from work.
|
| Even though I lived in one of the worst light-polluted cities
| in the region, I found that if I stood in the right place, so
| that I didn't have a streetlight in my face -- like under an
| eave -- and I just waited, my eyes would get used to the dark
| and I could see maybe 10 or 15 stars. Enough to make it
| interesting. All it takes is a little patience.
|
| Eventually, I started going out and getting the mail before she
| came home so I'd have more star time, and it wasn't too long
| before some of them became familiar friends, and I noticed how
| others changed position from week to week.
|
| It doesn't take much effort to appreciate the stars. But it's
| more effort than many people are willing to expend.
| [deleted]
| vmception wrote:
| Too bad they can't get funding for these kind of experiments. A
| two seal study with no input on how the experiment will be
| structured is pretty weak. Two seals in a 15 foot aquarium with a
| planetarium for a ceiling? Humans get larger planetariums and who
| knows how I choose which chair to walk toward.
| sitkack wrote:
| Being in a place where you can see the structure of the Milky Way
| very much feels like one is part of the Universe. There is
| _stuff_ out there, it has structure, color and form. When the
| stars disappear, so does our sense of place.
|
| There is so much we don't know, and so much of what we do as
| humans is arbitrage to trade something away from someone before
| they know what they have. Or to sell something only accounting
| for one dimension of value or worth.
| dmosley wrote:
| I agree wholly with this. Living in Southern NM we have a lot
| of stars. Just short drives and we can see the actual Milky Way
| band. I've always been saddened when I think of people who live
| in large cities and don't get to regularly see these things.
|
| Then, the first time I spotted Saturn and Jupiter with my
| telescope in my driveway I was struck with fresh awe. I had
| seen them before, in larger telescopes and higher resolution,
| but to track it with your own, to see them and try to
| comprehend how big they are in order order to be seen from so
| far away... I still get chills.
| _spduchamp wrote:
| Several years ago while camping up north, I swam in a lake in the
| middle of a perfectly clear night and could see the Milky Way
| like I had never seen before. With stars all around in my visual
| periphery, and being weightless in a star lit lake, I had the
| sensation of not looking up at the "dome" of stars, but standing
| affixed against a watery wall looking out, over, and into the
| depths of space in front of me. It was like watching out into
| space from a balcony.
|
| It was a new perspective for me and I wondered if whales ever see
| the night sky like that.
| gerbilly wrote:
| There is a scene in the film << Immortal Beloved >> where a
| young Beethoven has a similar experience.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59hhDE9ObxY
| ridiculous_fish wrote:
| Your story reminded me of this comic, about looking out at the
| stars. http://www.electricsheepcomix.com/rave/
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/2zW2N
| flerchin wrote:
| Animals do just fine on cloudy nights without stars.
| gryfft wrote:
| Plants do just fine on sunny days without rain. Can that be
| extrapolated to mean that the permanent cessation of all rain
| would not affect plants?
| neolog wrote:
| It's not even just the elimination of stars, but their
| replacement by city lights that actually mislead animals
| about where the stars/moon are.
| vnchr wrote:
| Excuse you, this thread is for criticism of satellites and
| modern civilization.
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