• shortwavesurfer@monero.town
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    1 year ago

    This stuff falls back into the atmosphere and burns up quite rapidly since it’s in extremely low orbit.

    • Gigan@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Even if 100% of the stuff burns up, it’s a lot of energy and materials that needs to be constantly replaced. Seems like a lot of maintenance to keep the array operating long-term.

      • teft@startrek.website
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        1 year ago

        Also vaporizing metals being added to the upper atmosphere isn’t exactly great.

        • Gigan@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Isn’t great how? Like in a going to make global warming-worse way or going to give us cancer way?

          • teft@startrek.website
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            1 year ago

            There are several effects this could have on Earth and the atmosphere. The presence of these particles could affect how water freezes into ice in the stratosphere, and influence the size of stratospheric aerosol particles. They could also induce salt deposition on aerosol particles, and alter the stratospheric refraction of light.

            These may seem like subtle changes, but they could have unintended consequences that we really ought to investigate, the researchers say.

            Link here

          • topinambour_rex@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Few months ago an article was published about how the rockets was warming the upper atmosphere and it was bad for it.

      • shortwavesurfer@monero.town
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        1 year ago

        You make a good point there for sure. The lower the orbit, the faster the return and burn up, but the lower the latency as well. That’s why usual satellite internet sucks so badly. Those satellites are in geostationary orbit and light takes 0.7 seconds to get there and back.

      • dinckel@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        This is what scares me the most. At a certain point, we’ll just have to go “whoops, our planet has no more resources to leech”, and we’ll be permanently stuck in stone age