Unfortunately, that seems to be the only solution.

However, it has serious disadvantages. It will exclude the poorer from astronomical research, except within the limits enabled by whatever cooperation the richer will be willing to do with them.

For the richer, that will make astronomical research much more expensive. When even USA, who claims to be the richest country, cuts a lot of the scientific funding, this makes likely a great reduction in the research targets that could be accomplished, even if a Lunar array of telescopes and radiotelescopes and communication relays for them were approved.

While professionals might still be able to do some work, the amateurs will be able less and less to enjoy the sight of the distant Universe.

There are already many years since I have become unable to see the sky that I enjoyed looking at when young, because it cannot be seen from the city where I live, due to light pollution (and high buildings). To see it again, I would have to go somewhere up in the mountains, far from a city or village, but I have not succeeded to do this recently. Even there now you can hardly look at the sky without seeing satellites, and it will only become much worse.

Nowadays there are many children who have never seen even once the sky that our ancestors were seeing every night, so many passages from old texts that mention the sky are unintelligible for them.

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mgfist 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I get what you're saying, but poor people want cheap internet/phone connectivity. They can't afford telescopes anyways.

And starlink (and the like) have more uses beyond good remote connectivity. They're a big reason why Ukraine didn't lose to Russia. They're also a potential avenue for people in oppressed nations to talk to the rest of the world (eg: Iran has a death penalty for starlink usage to counter this point).

	▲	adev_ 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> I get what you're saying, but poor people want cheap internet/phone connectivity. Nope. Starlink is not a tool for poor people. It's first and foremost a tool for middle class living in rural area with poor connectivity. As a comparison, it is estimated to that there is around 198M people in Nigeria with a Mobile phone connectivity. Compared around 67K Starlink users. Mobile being around 2-3x cheaper than Starlink there (even without considering the hardware), it remains an upper middle class privilege.

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adolph 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It will exclude the poorer from astronomical research, except within the limits enabled by whatever cooperation the richer will be willing to do with them.

Isn't it the case that most astronomical research uses source data from large telescopes and sky surveys? An example is the Rubin Science Platform [0] which makes available images and metadata from the Rubin Observatory along with compute and APIs?

https://data.lsst.cloud/

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inquirerGeneral 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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