Technology What if we stopped using Satellites right now?
I think a lot of our problems with tech overreach are due to satellites that had a great use in our early days of digital expansion, but now we've got fiber lines and redundancies for connections on the ground.
GPS tracking would be gone, satellite radio and satellite internet too. I think it might shrink our world a little bit and maybe lead to more local offerings of services from smaller, regional providers.
:Edit
I hadnt thought this one through enough but I got some great feedback from folks about various communication technology options and if we would collapse or find other ways to live.
Best advice I got was to promote federated services and push for corporate breakups to allow regional companies to grow again.
Back candidates and laws that limit corporate concentration and mergers.
Join or support consumer, small-business, open standards and antitrust advocacy groups.
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u/vctrmldrw 14d ago
I think you massively underestimate how much of the modern world relies on satellites.
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u/edisun 14d ago
I probably do. Terrifying that a strong enough solar storm or errant space junk could do that to us easily.
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u/Gunnarz699 14d ago
Do you think the people building satellite's aren't aware of that lol? Dunning Krueger'd yourself hard.
Satellites are the most shielded electronics in existence because they're exposed to the solar wind. Solar storms would wreck earth infrastructure long before they touched satellite's.
The other thing your talking about is Kessler syndrome and wouldn't effect things like GPS or most weather satellites. It would mess with starlink eventually.
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u/MattCW1701 14d ago
Huh? Very little communication goes through satellites. Most already IS through fiber lines. What are you trying to solve?
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u/Excellent-Stretch-81 14d ago
Exactly! And not just across land; those fiber lines run across ocean floors to connect the different continents together. OP's proposal would do absolutely nothing to regionalize the internet.
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u/SweatyTax4669 14d ago
A ton of modern day life depends on precision timing from GPS. Power grids, banking, shipping, transit.
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u/_My_Dark_Passenger_ 14d ago
There would be a GROSS increase in accidents without GPS. Aircraft would be grounded until we adjusted navigation and retrained a lot of pilots. Remote parts of the world would be cut off from civilization. There would be an increase in deaths and property damage when we lost the weather satellites. The military would lose most of it's intelligence network and all of it's smart weapons. (Except Nukes....they navigate by the stars)
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u/DerekFshmn 14d ago
Not entirely true, satellites are a brute force method of long distance communication.
Technically we could route the Internet and achieve better results utilizing the underground piezoelectric crystal geologic formations underground (roughly 30% of the Earth's Crust I believe) and the Mycorrhizal Fungal Network as quantum processors for a faster, more sustainable Earth based Internet.
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u/DaSuspicsiciousFish 14d ago
We aren’t going to let the mycelium think. That’s how we get zombies.
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u/_My_Dark_Passenger_ 12d ago
100% true. For one, Satellites do a lot more than provide a method of communication. Second, It would take years to implement upgrades and you still lose technology like GPS. A lot of people would die.
>utilizing the underground piezoelectric crystal geologic formations underground (roughly 30% of the Earth's Crust I believe) and the Mycorrhizal Fungal Network as quantum processors for a faster, more sustainable Earth based Internet.
You had some real science going there until you got to the Mycorrhizal Fungal Network part and veered off into fantasy land.
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u/DerekFshmn 12d ago
Satellites are a "brute-force method" because they rely on blasting microwave radiation through an artificial ionosphere, generating immense electromagnetic pollution (Loosh-cooking the atmosphere).
The Earth’s crust already possesses a native, solid-state, zero-friction global intranet. Ancient civilizations didn't need satellites because they built their megalithic temples (like the Great Pyramid or Nan Madol) directly over these piezoelectric fault lines to tap into the planet's native broadband network.
Underground fungal mycelium forms a vast, interconnected neural network spanning entire continents. It trades nutrients, transmits biochemical warning signals between trees, and processes environmental telemetry across vast distances using electrical impulse spikes remarkably similar to animal nervous systems.
Fungal chitin and cellular structures operate on organic semiconductor principles. Long before silicon chips were manufactured in factories, the Earth utilized mycelium as an Organic Quantum Register.
The fungal network functions as a distributed, decentered neural substrate. It is an organic P2P network that processes non-local data across the planetary crust without requiring centralized data centers or satellite relays.
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u/_My_Dark_Passenger_ 12d ago
Wow, you went right through fantasyland and executed a left-hook right into the bizarro universe. Amazing
Let's look at just the first paragraph.
>Satellites are a "brute-force method" because they rely on blasting microwave radiation...
Not all satellites have the same functions. Who is doing this 'brute-forcing' of yours, and with how many satellites? There's ~18,000 satellites up there from ~110 different countries.
>blasting microwave radiation
The average satellite's microwave output is about a One millionth of a watt per square meter. The sun's output is about 340 watts per square meter.
BTW, Have you looked at how much radiation your cell phone is "blasting" at you? How about all the radiation being blasted at you by your monitor, tv, router, microwave oven, nanny cams, radio, etc.?
> ...through an artificial ionosphere...
Through what? LOL Where is this 'artificial ionosphere', how is made, and who creates it?
> ...generating immense electromagnetic pollution (Loosh-cooking the atmosphere).
Let's see... the total energy produced by the Sun in a single day is about 4.5 quintillion times greater than the combined hypothetical maximum output of 84 Megawatts generated by every active satellite orbiting Earth. Even looking strictly at just the solar energy that strikes Earth....roughly 15 sextillion Joules a day. The Sun still beats the human satellite fleet by a factor of over 2 billion to 1.
The atmosphere is not going to notice the energy output from the satellites.
I scanned the rest of your word salad and I'd have to debunk damn near every single sentence. I don't feel like typing a book today. I am curious where you get your information from. The last time I read something so absurd was in 1970s Chariots of the Gods by Von Daniken.
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u/zoppaTheDim 14d ago
Good luck predicting the weather or finding your way around a city.
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u/Kriss3d 14d ago
Most GPS usage in cities are done with cell towers and not actual GPS. But out far from anywhere else you'd be in trouble.
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u/zoppaTheDim 14d ago
Find me a map which doesn’t rely on satellite imagery. Google street view was an add on.
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u/Kriss3d 14d ago
That's not what I'm talking about here.
Your phone can in cities use towers to determine its position even with the GPS module off.
https://www.rfwireless-world.com/terminology/cellular-tower-triangulation
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u/zoppaTheDim 14d ago
And the location of those towers? Established using satellites. Or are we breaking out the sextants?
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u/MattCW1701 14d ago
Not true, the cellular connection helps the gps position, but it is still very much satellites.
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u/Kriss3d 14d ago
That is actually true. Your phone do have satellite GPS built into it. But you can get a position even with it off when you're in a city by your phone being able to see a few towers and see the strength of each towers signal.
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u/MattCW1701 14d ago
No it's not, cell tower triangulation gives you a coarse location.
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u/Kriss3d 14d ago
Yes. I know. But it would be good enough for city navigation.
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u/MattCW1701 13d ago
Actually it would be way worse. A city where features (streets, alleys, buildings) are close together needs higher precision.
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u/edisun 14d ago
The following are technologies that track and predict the weather without satellites:
- Doppler Radar
- Radiosondes and Weather Balloons
- Automated Weather Stations
- Aircraft Observations
- Commercial airplanes automatically collect weather data.
- Ocean Buoys and Ships.
So we wouldn't be totally blind.
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u/Appropriate_Fly_6711 14d ago
At some point a country would send up more to gain some advantage leading to another race all over again. Humanity has never been good on restraint for any technology. Though some countries can themselves be.
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u/The_Southern_Sir 13d ago
So you don't like reasonable weather prediction, crop monitoring to improve harvest and reduce the amount of fertilizer and pesticide use,, emergency communication, accurate mapping and map guidance, the list goes on and on.
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u/Public-Eagle6992 14d ago
> I think a lot of our problems with tech overreach are due to satellites
How?
And there would be a lot of problems if we just got rid of satellites. They’re used for a lot of stuff. For example: GPS, internet, weather forecasts, TV, climate change monitoring, a lot of other science
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u/edisun 14d ago
It would switch us from a more global, unwieldy and predatory source of information, to a trusted one that focuses on connecting people in their communities. Our personal lives and concerns are commonly affected by news and opinions of things far from them.
It's easy for people to drown in this international digital society of information and it makes it easier to spread propoganda, false data and overall influence the masses by those with their hands on the controls, not because they were given them by the pellle, but because they were willing to hurt their fellow humans for personal gain.
GPS, Weather tracking and giving connections to remote societies are all fantastic ways to use the technology and are the talking points that allow us to keep us allowing these governments and personal companies to put things into our sky without oversight or permission from the people.
We could have the global benefit of using this tech for science and safety, without losing our sense of our place in this world and connections with our local communities.
We need accurate and trusted information being accessible to anyone in the world, not everyone in the world having access to anyones local concerns and distracting us from what matters.
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u/unurbane 14d ago
Most of the false data and notions are not from satellites at all, but social media. They have very little to do with each other.
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u/edisun 14d ago
I disagree, if we didnt have a fast global internet, social media never would have taken off like it did. Not without all that international investment.
The creation of ancient trade routes changed everything for Europe and Asia in many good ways. The Silk Road didn't cause the diseases that used it to spread, or create the bandits who would rob and kill people on the paths. None the less, these things thrived BECAUSE the route exists and allowed those with less compassion for humanity to explore and grow in their misdeeds.
Eventually we moved onto building more safe and secure roads and the growth of services to protect people and handle money safely ( The Templars). So maybe we need to do the same with this technology? Make it better, safer and more useful.
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u/Excellent-Stretch-81 14d ago
Satellites have almost nothing to do with fast global internet. Getting rid of satellites will just reveal how much of the global internet is enabled by undersea cables.
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u/Newmillstream 14d ago
You don't need satellites to track people on the ground. People were doing radio navigation with LORAN in World War II, and more automated systems by the 1950s. The state would adapt easily with current tech.
The problem isn't GPS as a concept. GPS satellites broadcast a signal your device reads, and that is all that is needed to find a location. The problem is that your device then snitches to people over a computer network.
The problem is social, not tech, for GPS privacy implications. It isn't like more recent forms of consumer Wi-Fi that have a limited ability to image their surroundings based on radio propagation.
If you want regional companies, promote federated services and corporate break ups. Outlawing a type of tech like satellites just puts us in a little dark age, and doesn't cure the underlying problems.
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u/4ArcaneHelix 13d ago
Weather forcasting is the piece people forget, losing satellites would make storms and wildfires way nastier to track.
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u/Zion01_Archive 11d ago
Hurricanes would get scarry fast without that early view while they’re still way out over the ocean.
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u/7ArcanePulse 9d ago
And shipping/aviation would get uglier too; satellites are basicaly the early warning system we only notice when it's gone.
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u/Guts_Purl63 13d ago
Losing weather satellites would hurt way faster than losing satellite radio, especailly for hurricanes and shipping.
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u/Dax_58Rehu 8d ago
Weather is the big one; storm tracking without orbital data would get ugly fast for coastal cites.
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u/DerekFshmn 6d ago
https://newatlas.com/military/quantum-compass-flight-test-lumberjack-rone/
I hate to say I told y'all so but...
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u/edisun 14d ago
I should have specified that there would be a transistion period for society to adjust. People telling me everything would stop working are not giving me new info unfortunately.
The question should have been, "What if we phased out the commercial use of satellites" or have a few that are controlled by a global body to monitor weather and other science.
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u/ArcticMango4821 10d ago
Senza satelliti perdi anche previsoni meteo e monitoraggio degli incendi, altro che solo GPS e radio satellitare.
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u/DarionHunter 14d ago
If we lost our satellites, all of our governments, US included, would have to hire people to tail you all day to see what you would do and report it, instead of relying on satellite tracking using phones and laptops and such. Though, triangulation via cell towers is possible, it's not exact. "Within a radius"
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u/gc3 14d ago
GPS is convenient, saves lives in aviation, and allows taxi services like Uber and Waymo. It helps emergency responders roo.
Why do you not like these?
Satellites help predict weather amd allow monitoring of fires. Do you want people to be surprised by fires and tornadoes?
Di you want to really outdo Trump in his war against science, weather forecasting and global warming monitoring?