No, it’s illegal to bring starlink devices here, and I heard that Elon Musk chooses to block China from accessing starlink too, to appease the Chinese authorities.
Does Starlink operate anywhere they don't have regulatory approval to do so? It's not like this is serving a website. There's physical spectrum licensing involved in operating anywhere.
"Appease" is such a loaded word. He's literally not allowed by law to do it. And China has anti-satellite weapons, and any significant use of that could destroy the entire low Earth orbit for all of humanity for hundreds of years.
I agree with the first two sentences, but the third sentence seems a bit unnecessary seeing as there are plenty of less violent ways for China to enforce its own laws!
Hundreds of years? Starlink satellites are on decaying orbit that would last 5 years, tops. That includes their debris. This post is unnecessarily licking the boots of the richest westerners in modern times.
He doesn't allow Chinese access because the government of China doesn't want him to and he thinks he will make more money keeping them happy than if he pissed them off.
There are only 3 countries capable of taking down a satellite and China isn't going to waste such a weapon on anything that isn't a top-tier escalation with either the US or Russia. Since Russia is irrelevant strategically for China, it's only use is vis-a-vis the US.
Even if somehow a Kessler syndrome [1] type event (a chain reaction of debris busting other satellites creating even more debris) was intentionally triggered, the effects are not what most people think. Launches would remain perfectly safe simply because space is massive. What would happen is that certain orbital velocities would end up with an unacceptably high risk of collision over time, and so you wouldn't want to go into orbits that spend any significant amount of time at those velocities.
The neat thing about orbital mechanics is that your orbital altitude is determined 100% by your orbital velocity. Even in the case of an eccentric orbit, your velocity changes as you go from your furthest point to your closest point. A purely circularized orbit is an orbit where your velocity stays constant.
Extremely high energy debris would often end up escaping Earth's orbit and probably end up orbiting the Sun. And lower energy debris would often end up entering the atmosphere and burning up. So only fragments that remain in a sort of demented goldilocks zone would end up being dangerous. So in general I think the answer is - not much, especially in strikes of satellites near LEO. US, Russia, China, and India have all carried out live fire tests of anti-satellite weapons.
You us missile effector(s) against individual satellites. Hence why clouds of smaller satellites are more survivable.
If kinetic, then a bunch of space debris are created. Some larger pieces, some smaller. If those intersect with other satellites, they may generate additional debris (see Kessler Syndrome, what parent was talking about).
But on the other hand, low earth orbits (where Starlink et al operate) will decay much faster than higher orbits, so it's a {wait time} problem rather than a {have to cleanup manually} problem.
And also space, even Earth orbits, is big. Satellites manage not to hit each other most of the time. A limited strike (e.g. the previous US or Chinese demonstrations) probably won't cascade.
Nuking satellites is more of an all-or-nothing scenario. Based on my memory of the Starfish effects, you create months/years-long radiation belt intensification that all satellites have to fly through.
And being "superior" doesn't necessarily mean extraordinary coding skills. The vast majority of code to be written doesn't require that. What it requires however is a combination of common sense and good understanding of the underlying business. This is in short supply in many of the locations the jobs are being offshored to. But let's be honest, it was also on short supply in the corporate IT departments being offshored, though not quite to the same degree.
I was told there is so much automation on those planes, the pilot does little flying. I always assumed they were kept busy going through their compliance trainings.
There is a theory that if we could find the same janitor and get them to plug the same broken vacuum cleaner to the same socket in exactly the same way, mankind's energy problem will be forever solved, one way or the other.
There is another theory that this has already happened.
I was exactly thinking this the other day while running and seeing an old, rusted lamp post in a rural street: "this was probably put there over 50 years ago, in the early seventies", and then thought at things from "over 50 years ago" when I was a child and well, WW2 was in its making. I don't know while I thought that but that's probably also a sign of our age: WW2 was the biggest thing "from the past" that our families lived or were touched more or less directly.
But also ww2 is this black and white thing from our history books. As we get older we get to know more about how recent and relevant it is, we met people who lived it and told us about their actual experience. But it still feels like something that belongs to history rather than a recent event. That's kind of the "anything that happened before my birth I don't care" attitude of today's teenagers.
I'm a Brit born in 66, and growing up I felt that WW2 was recent history. War films were a dominant genre in my early life, we visited the German defences on the French coast while camping as a teenager along with my Grandfather, who served there and visited some locations he remembered. Some buildings still had war damage. In many ways the world of the 70s felt closer to the war era than to nowadays. It was still the cold war, and that was just an extension of the post-war stalemate.
As a German born in 87, it didn't feel _that_ recent any more. But it was definitely close, both my granddads served in the war and were scarred for life by that, mentally and physically. Family history a mess of war-torn biographies. I found some rusted, old big munition in the forest as a kid. Old bunkers and flak towers can still be seen in the cities, and many of the local kids in my hometown and age cohort adventured into the old mining shaft used as an air raid shelter and saw the gas masks that were still there. And then there was the GDR (or DDR, Deutsche Demokratische Republik, in German) and all the reunification that happened when I was already alive (although I was a child at the time).
Thinking about my childhood visit to Ost-Berlin still makes me shiver with thoughts about all the suffering. Many of the buildings still had bullet holes and it felt like you could touch history.
I am from 82 (Dutch) and I still remember vividly visiting the border/iron curtain in 89 (just before the wall came down). My mom would jokingly put her arm through the fence and say 'my arm is in communist East Germany' (technically DMZ I guess) and my parents would tell that they would shoot people trying to cross from the other side.
We often go to Germany, but this summer we went to Rügen. To get there we have to travel directly east, those trips just make you realize how close we were to the border and thus to an authoritarian regime.
Many of the buildings still had bullet holes and it felt like you could touch history.
When you know where to look, you can still find the scars everywhere. Our church tower still has bullet holes from WWII.
Some of the scars are so big, it's easy to miss the forest for the trees. A few years ago, I realized that the big cities of the Ruhrgebiet area were beautiful towns once, with amazing historic buildings. The hellscape of 60s and 70s buildings that dominates Cities like Bochum or Duisburg is a result of these cities being bombed into oblivion.
It's all so very sad.
That's interesting. I was also born in 1966, but in the US. WW2 didn't seem/feel all that recent to me, probably because it had mostly happened far away. I was interested in learning about it and read lots of books, and watched movies. The drive to visit relatives did go by an aircraft carrier (USS Essex) at the scrapyard, but other than that physical artifacts of the war were rare. And the only relative I had who fought in the war was a great-uncle, but he passed away when I was very young.
In a world where you can cast your vote anonymously in the voting booth, it’s a dangerous game to piss off a large number of voters, even if they can’t admit publicly why. They will be reminded every day of that idiotic policy. Like cookie consent banners.
I think you’re correct and the person you’re replying to is correct too.
Voters aren’t all that rational. They could choose to vote against the person that blocked their access to porn but also choose to vote against the person who made porn available again because doing so puts children in danger or whatever the scaremongering line would be.
Though technically France always worked on that assumption. Or rather, that the US would support France against a soviet invasion up to a certain level, but wouldn't risk a nuclear war for France's pretty eyes. Hence the will to have no other finger than the French president's finger on its red button.
And to be honest that's the only way it can ever be. I don't understand France's talk about extending its nuclear deterence to the rest of Europe. Those european countries can no more rely on France than France can rely on the US in those extreme scenarios. Nuclear deterence is like the bee's sting. It will die if it uses it, but it's because you know it will use it that you tread carefully.
I think it's very simple. France hinted at placing its own nuclear bombers closer to the Russian border. That does not require that other European countries trust France. It's just France shifting its nuclear posture a bit more to the East.
Does France have submarines with nuclear weapons? I’m not sure how much of a deterrent nuclear bombers are compared to ICBMs, but it’s better than not having them.
My understanding is that jetfighters with nuclear weapons are meant to deliver an ultimate warning by nuking the invading army. ICBM are what comes next (unless the enemy went ICBM first).
That being said this all assumed that Russia had a strong air-defence. The various strikes that Ukraine has been able to make on Russian territory seems to have challenged that idea. I don't know how confident Putin feels he could block such attack, so that adds to the dissuasion too. The thing with nukes is that it only takes one missile to go through.
A nuclear first strike is the worst deterrent possible, though. It basically enables and ensures a nuclear retaliatory strike, which is how you rapidly reach midnight on the atomic clock, queueing up WW3.
I don’t think France would ever strike first with nukes, even against Russia invading France itself. Conventional munitions and bombs are justifiable, but I can’t see France nuking any EU country that is being invaded by Russia or anyone else, even as a last resort. There’s nothing to gain militarily by doing so, and it would only give their enemies justification to escalate.
I honestly don’t know much about French nuclear doctrine and policy, so I would be happy to be corrected or pointed in the right direction.
Whether it would be followed in practice is anyone's guess. But place yourself in the shoes of the invading country. You are basically facing the same question. Would France ultimately use nuclear weapons? You may think that they will likely not. But if they do, that's a path to having your cities and basically your civilisation wiped out. So at what percentage probability are you still happy to try your luck at invading France? Unless you are a Hitler or Stalin, who were happy to spend tens of millions of their own population without a second thought, there is no scenario where a rational leader will be taking that risk. And therefore deterence is achieved.
I appreciate the nuanced response. France needs this capability to be publicly known for it to have the desired deterrent effect, and like most military expenditures, the intent to use it is somewhat independent from the capability to use it. I think France needed a new Maginot Line, and this is likely what that looks like in current year.
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