No obviously not. But this is silly framing because there are so many things we do because it increases the effort for bad actors to do bad things. We close and lock our doors not because it prevents break-ins, but because that is a barrier that makes breaking in more inconvenient.
I see what you're saying, but I don't agree that it works this way. Parents' concerns for their children are far more self-serving than most parents claim. Consider that every "for the children" political agenda ever has nakedly ulterior motives--name one truly pro-child policy where children are directly prioritized at the expense of their parents? Consider the way that school schedules are oriented around their parents' convenience in spite of decades of studies showing the harmful health effects they have. During COVID we saw dramatic efforts to protect the elderly coupled with a push to reopen schools by parents tired of having to take care of them all day. Whatever you think of the restrictions one way or another, the prioritization of elderly was apparent throughout. These are the same parents who have repeated voted benefits for themselves at the direct expense of their children, saddling them with trillions of dollars of debt to support their own present consumption. I promise you, if seniors were regularly being gunned down like this they would have found a solution already.
This is exactly why Starlink is successful. If we had decent regulations, and had actual good internet on the ground, why would we bother going to outer space? The truth is that it's cheaper to build an ISP in space to work around the corruption that has kept all these monopolies in power.
Regulations or not, building a terrestrial network is expensive. Once all the permits are granted, it still costs on the order of $5/foot ($25k/mile) to buy and install fiber. (Cost varies with labor costs and by installation type, obviously.) And you need backhaul, multiplexers or switches, etc.
In a fairly dense area with a lot of customers and proximity to existing transit providers, fiber is very cost effective. In a rural area with long last-mile links and few customers, fiber is more expensive and satellite can win.
Starlink has another potential issue in dense areas: limited bandwidth. The beams from satellites that are near each other can interfere with each other, so doubling the number of satellites may not double the aggregate bandwidth available in a given small, densely populated area. In contrast, fiber scales better than linearly up to huge bandwidth: installing 10 strands of fiber is much less than twice as expensive as installing five strands, and the bandwidth available per single-mode strand has been increasing over time without any requirement to use fancier fiber.
I'm under the assumption that Starlink will never provide more than one percent of the mobile bandwidth in a developed country. Because they can't match dense antenna webs in cities. Am I wrong?
It's still going to be what, $100,000 per ton to launch on Starship?
The AI1 Satellite that SpaceX has shown, is basically one rack. Something like 72 GPUs. Elon himself said it was a "rack in space" more than a datacenter in space. Sure I guess you could launch 100,000 of them and call it a datacenter. But their own graphic shows this thing to be 2 to 2 1/2 tons. So who is gonna spend $200,000 to launch a single rack into space? Get the panels as cheap as you want, the launch cost is still pretty massive just to get 150kw of free power.
I mean maybe my napkin math is way wrong here, but I don't see what the cost savings is.
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