If they only answer SOME people.

Starling is the company that is placing thousands of micro-satellites all around the globe, to give fast internet connectivity to (mainly) residential users in areas underserved or unreachable by other networks. Surely, this can have better applications than gaming, or streaming sitcoms in the middle of nowhere, from education to keeping emergency workers online amid wildfires.

But that is not a complete picture. Thanks to a ZDNet article, I have just discovered a recent “Ask Me Anything” Reddit forum with Starlink engineers. I browsed about half of it, because it got over 1400 questions, comments and answers, but found (unsurprisingly) almost nothing of something that should have really be there.

Increasingly great

Some users worried about whether Starlink can keep up its current speed. The engineers replied, “as we launch more satellites over time the network will get increasingly great, not increasingly worse.”

First world questions first. And only first world answers

The overwhelming majority of questions where pretty geeky, and there is nothing wrong with that.

The problem is that almost nobody asked questions like these [edited for clarity], but above all that, as far as I could see, nobody from Starlink answered them:

• How low can the final magnitude (that is, brightness) of the satellites go in their final orbit? Will it be low enough to not obstruct astronomers too much? Do you see this as an actual issue?
• There are already few enough places left to see the night sky unpolluted as it is.
• It is sad that almost nobody here cares about light pollution, or space garbage. For [whoever enjoys] the night sky, this project is a catastrophe.
• It’s astounding also how these big companies can do whatever they want with a resource (ie. the night sky) that belongs to all living beings in this planet, and everything seems to be tolerated “in the name of progress”

Again: I have not browsed all the over 1400 comments in that thread. But in more than half of them, I have found no answer, and no acknowledgment at all, to the issue that, even outside the West, there are actual people worrying that someone can OWN the night sky.