I’m more familiar with how Starlink compares to existing publicly-available satellite internet options. Here are some brief points:
- data throughput orders of magnitude higher,
- the ability to use smaller and more portable antennas (e.g. ~100 Mbps with something the size of a textbook, currently ~2 Mbps and soon ~10s Mbps with your normal mobile phone),
- order of magnitude lower latency compared to GSO satellites.
Other constellations like Iridium dedicate large portions to use by government(s?), too, but simply do not have the throughput or total bandwidth that Starlink does. Your speeds there, on the expensive business plans that offer it, are measured in the low Kbps.
Respectfully disagree as you're comparing the surface to the size of the object, so it definitely matters.
Here's some math:
Average Earth diameter: 12742kms + 10km
Average airplane surface area = 500m2
12752^2*pi = 510,865,389km2
Surface flight/plane = 1021730 planes
Starlink orbit height = ~500km
Surface at orbit = ~551,712,377 so ~8% increase (which is non-negligible)
Average Starlink satellite surface area = ~7m2
Surface LEO/satelite = 78816053 satellites (77x compared to airplanes)
Daily flights 50k-100k. Total number of satellites <20k.
And this is only for Starlink LEO. If you go for higher orbits the surface grows substantially. Also satellites have predictable paths, altitudes, airplanes maneuver and turn, gain altitude/lose altitude. They gather around points (airfields) etc...
I would argue that 8% is absolutely negligible; however one thing that isn't is that airspace is a narrow band vertically (12 km? Not sure exactly), while LEO is about 800 km thick (from about 200 km, because the Kármán line isn't good enough, to about 1000 km).
Conversely:
> Daily flights 50k-100k. Total number of satellites <20k.
Those 20k satellites orbit roughly every 95 minutes, so they're doing ~15 orbits per day, and even the longest flights from conventional aircraft are about half that distance, so by distance each satellite in LEO is doing strictly more than the equivalent of 30 flights per day each.
Research I'm doing for a blog post has shown me that the exact position of a satellite is surprisingly variable compared to what you'd reasonably expect from a "Newtonian spherical Earth with a perfect vacuum" approximation of the orbits, enough so that it makes sense to treat 1 km as the "collision avoidance manoeuvres needed" threshold.
Airplanes are much more likely to collide, but they don't dump hyperspeed shrapnel into the airspace that persists for months or years when they do. It makes sense to be extremely paranoid about satellite collisions.
Yes, I agree! But a 10% increase in surface area of LEO isn't small when compared to the size of the satellite, taking into account how the surface area at 10km compares to airplanes.
10% is an outrageously large change in a normal loan interest rate and an irrelevant change when comparing the weight of a paper plane to a real one. Keeping in mind another factor in your comparison was 7700%, I'm inclined to agree the 10% is negligible in context. It's fun to think about though.
But 10% is 50 million square kilometers. If we project this surface area to a theoretical planet with a diameter of 2000kms this planet alone would support 2000+ Starlink satellites in LEO. This is again not negligible.
There are all sorts of such scenarios beyond the one being discussed where it's a relevant amount. This is true of most any measure or metric and why the context that we're talking about the skies of Earth compared to the LEO of Earth is key. Once you remove that context and start comparing against other things you can any difference insignificant or critically massive by choice.
The article indicates they were unable to handle the increased electricity load, which caused blackouts.
Additionally, sometimes unnaturally high temperatures break AC systems put in place with poor planning. This is very common in UK supermarkets every summer.
I know the average temps have gone up and there have been more extremes, but it's not like it moved 20˚F. They really don't have that level of tolerance in these systems? USA and other countries have been dealing with global warming too, the A/C still works.
The affected building was last renovated in the early 1990s, where average max temperature was around 18 degrees.
But even now "normal" average max temperature is only 21.7 degrees[1] and on the 23 of June temperatures reached 36.6 degrees, which is indeed over 20 deg F hotter than the normal maximum temperature for June.
I get what you mean with the normal max temp being 21.7C, but would expect the AC to be able to handle the peaks, and 33.5C wasn't unheard of ~20 years ago. Not sure what the situation was in the early 1990s, but they had 30 years to figure it out.
If it's every summer, how is it unnatural? If it's poor planning how is it every summer? There's poor planning and then there's ... what, forgetting that summer happens? It sounds to me like somebody sat down and penciled in some numbers and decided that "it makes less money to let it break?" which seems pretty weird when you consider second-order stuff (but it's not like people tend to do that anyway)
He is far more than just a narrator. His 77-year career created and defined the wildlife/nature documentary as a genre, beginning at a time when television was so new that it really was just him and a few individuals making all the decisions. In his youth, he was given some cash and sent to travel the world in a 2-3 man team, off-grid for months, in the “Zoo Quest” series - the first time anyone had really seen animals, in the wild, on television.
Switching to a desk job, he went on to use his position in the BBC to green-light then-pioneering documentaries like “Civilisation” and “The Ascent of Man” (and still travelled occasionally for anthropological and nature documentaries, that he also green-lit) that remain a huge influence on all documentaries today.
Then in 1979, “Life on Earth” created an entirely new format of nature documentary that has only seen iterative change in the almost-50-years since. The rest, as they say, is history. He’s been heavily involved in the production of so many documentaries in the decades since, only reducing his role as he got older. Even in his 90s most of the series he narrates have short on-location sequences with him.
It’s safe to say that he, perhaps more than anyone else, created the “nature documentary” - both in experimenting with the format, and in green-lighting shows - and therefore shares a huge amount of responsibility for the many positive second order effects. Certainly in the UK, I would argue that a significant amount of public awareness of climate change comes from BBC documentaries. As attested to by others in this thread, generations of scientists and conservationists pursued their professions in part because they were inspired by him (and I can throw my own hat in the ring for this). It was also spoken about, at his 100th birthday concert, what an outsized influence his documentaries had on increased worldwide awareness of plastics pollution and the recent UN treaty beginning to address it.
His voice, really, is secondary to all that.
(I would highly recommend reading his “Adventures of a Young Naturalist” and “Journeys to the Other Side of the World” books for anyone with an interest in this sort of thing. They’re combined volumes of books he wrote back in the 1950s and 60s about his Zoo Quest expeditions - both a wondrous first-person view of the travels and interactions with wildlife, but also a fascinating teleportation back in time into a world where air travel and television were brand new, and all of these remote communities were near-untouched compared to today).
Life on Earth was hugely ambitious in ideas too, covering the whole history of life, with evolution as an underpinning theory throughout. As a child, it had much more impact on me than anything else on TV, and I still remember a lot of scenes.
I disagree with the claim that a greater proportion of people go hungry, and more are homeless, today than at any point in recent western history. These have broadly been on a downwards trend over the last century.
Of course many do struggle, and that should not be dismissed by pointing to the past. But it nonetheless strikes me as naive to believe that people today are hungrier than at any point in recent history - the obesity crisis, and its lack of discrimination between social classes, should at least in part demonstrate this.
In my opinion, such exaggerations mostly serve to discredit and distract from legitimate complaints about the cost of living today.
Recent Western history, 70s to early 00s. I doubt many people were going hungry in the US and UK back then, as much as they are now.
The obesity crisis is in part because of the unavailability of nutritious food and the proliferation of cheap junk masquerading as food. But even that is getting expensive these days. Actual food prices have been going on an uptick since the 00s.
I will make my stand on the fact that more people lived better during the 90s in the West than now.
> Imagine you take a conspiracy influencer and actually put them in the spacecraft with the astronauts so they could see the whole thing with their own eyes and wouldn't be able to deny it. They return to earth to tell their followers that it's all real. Do you think everyone will be convinced, or would they say he's now in on the conspiracy and find a new person to lead the conspiracy theory?
"The participating flat Earthers all admitted that the midnight sun was a real phenomenon. The larger flat Earth community has largely rejected the results and accused the participants, including the flat Earthers, of having faked the expedition and of being part of a larger conspiracy to promote the spherical Earth model."
The Final Experiment (https://www.the-final-experiment.com/) essentially did this by inviting "prominent" flat earthers to Antarctica to witness 24 hours of daylight. Very few did, but they are now shunned by the true flat earthers.
Church/religion. Flat-earthers believe in a very literal interpretation of the Bible which dictates that the earth is flat.
When I was doing my student teaching, one of the teachers in my department was a creationist, but he didn’t seem to have read Genesis 1 at all because when I asked him about the firmament in the heavens separating the waters above from the waters below, he had no idea what I was talking about. At least the flat-earthers know enough scripture to follow their dogma all the way to its absurd endpoint.
"Flat Earth"[0] is more like a cult[1]. One introduces a significant barrier to entry. New members learn the approved vocabulary/jargon that identifies "in group" and "out group" people. Outsiders tend to reject new members[2]. New members tend to stay due to the "sunken cost" fallacy. The high barrier to entry and cost of leaving (losing your community - because you will be shunned for doing so) prevents people from leaving or associating with people who have left.
2 - This is why religions such as Jehovah's Witnesses require members to proselytize (including going door-to-door) because outsiders are so adverse to the members that the other insiders remark things like "those outsiders are so depraved, that's why you can only be with 'true believers' like us".
> However, they just change their original message, maybe to remove a typo, change the date or add a friendly note. Then the three letter agency does a glorified 'diff' and they are subsequently in on the chat.
Your entire comment is filled with false claims and figures.
In 2025-26 there are an estimated 39.1 million people paying income tax - 56.0% of the population [1]. Of course, in the last census, 20.7% of the population were children [2]. About 3.1% of the population are UK students in University education [3], and about 18.6% of the population are retired [4]. I've also missed all the 18-year-olds in their final year of school, which is roughly 1.1 million or 1.6% of the population [5]. About 8.8 million, or 12.6%, are pensioners who pay income tax that I have double counted, usually due to private pensions and other sources of income [6].
Totally these numbers gives a rough estimate that suggest only about 12.6% of working age people do not pay income tax. This is in line with the government's own statistics putting those claiming Universal Credit at 10.6% of the population [7], or those economically inactive at 12.9% [8]. This is wildly different to your implication that 61% of people are too lazy to work.
Unemployment, which is roughly defined as those out of work who are actively looking for work, is at 5.2% [9], which it is worth noting is slightly below the EU and Euro area average of 5.9% and 6.2% respectively [10]. Direct comparisons are difficult to make, but it is certainly indicative of the UK falling within what is considered a healthy range.
Furthermore, take-home pay on a £100,000 salary is £68,561 [11], giving an effective income tax of 31.4% - far below your claim of 71%. True, there is the so-called "£100k tax trap" which gradually reduces your tax-free allowance above this salary. But this still gives just a 37.6% tax on £125,000, or 41.1% on £200,000. You may consider these to be high, but they are far, far below your claim of 71% income tax.
I think the reason behind this is that the UK NHS is using a lot of budget on long-term ill people who they believe aren't really long-term ill, or who at least could be working. Essentially, they feel they can't trust their employees and want LLMs to do it instead.
So they want LLMs to look at all the files, and essentially kick a lot such people off the NHS. That's what they're paying for.
In other words they want to "Elon Musk the NHS, DOGE-style".
This is, of course, highly illegal to do. There is no way giving medical data to a US consultancy does not violate UK and EU law something awful. The government knows this, does it anyway. Which is one reason you won't be able to do anything about this: the government has zero intention to respect the law in this case. You will, of course, be expected to pay your taxes correctly.
This depends entirely on how you hold your phone in your hand. For some positions, someone would need a 5” thumb to reach the corner. You can’t make such sweeping statements for something with such variation.
Any idea when that changed? I've been unable to access historical sites in the past because someone parked the domain and had a very restrictive robots.txt on it.
- data throughput orders of magnitude higher,
- the ability to use smaller and more portable antennas (e.g. ~100 Mbps with something the size of a textbook, currently ~2 Mbps and soon ~10s Mbps with your normal mobile phone),
- order of magnitude lower latency compared to GSO satellites.
Other constellations like Iridium dedicate large portions to use by government(s?), too, but simply do not have the throughput or total bandwidth that Starlink does. Your speeds there, on the expensive business plans that offer it, are measured in the low Kbps.