The solar panels on the newest satellites can deliver 6kW but the power that satellite actually uses is less. The satellite is only using 300W[1] during the dark phase of it's orbit when it can use it's entire mass to cool down. Is that limit because of the battery or is it because the satellite needs to radiate all the heat it acquired from the other half of the time in the sun?
Looks like that's a purely speculative assumption the blog author made, not a fact. I'm not sure why he made that assumption given that Starlink doesn't actually stop working at night.
Fair point that in SSO you'd need 2-3x the radiator area (and half the solar panels, and minimal/no batteries). I don't think that invalidates my point though.
If the satellite requires ~3,000 W to work in the light phase (based on solar panel size), then reducing that to 300 W during the dark phase would most definitely require it to "stop working".
The battery math is based on purely speculative assumptions the author made about cycle lifetimes. It's not grounded in any real, concrete information like the solar panel power calculations are.
There's a synergy effect here - Tesla sells you a solar roof and car bundle, the roof comes without a battery (making it cheaper) and the car now gets a free recharge whenever you're home (making it cheaper in the long term).
Of course that didn't work out with this specific acquisition, but overall it's at least a somewhat reasonable idea.
In comparison to datacenters in space yes. Solar roofs are already a profitable business, just not likely to be high growth. Datacenters in space are unlikely to ever make financial sense, and even if they did, they are very unlikely to show high growth due to continuing ongoing high capital expenses inherent in the model.
I think a better critique of space-based data centres is not that they never become high growth, it's just that when they do it implies the economy is radically different from the one we live in to the degree that all our current ideas about wealth and nations and ownership and morality and crime & punishment seem quaint and out-dated.
The "put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space" for example, that's as far ahead of the entire planet Earth today as the entire planet Earth today is from specifically just Europe right after the fall of Rome. Multiplicatively, not additively.
There's no reason to expect any current business (or nation, or any given asset) to survive that kind of transition intact.
It's obviously a pretty weird thing for a car company to do, and is probably just a silly idea in general (it has little obvious benefit over normal solar panels, and is vastly more expensive and messy to install), but in principle it could at least work, FSOV work. The space datacenter thing is a nonsensical fantasy.
It's not about the Iranian government killing its own. Then we should have seen a lot more interventions. It's about oil and regional power. The US wants that the region is in hands of their allies and Iran threatens this.
Yes. Iran’s territory includes ethnic minorities that could be joined to its neighbors, neighbours who are less brutal. Starting there might be a good first step since we’re now firmly back into redrawing borders with force.
Really? You are advocating regional/civil war, aligned with ethnic ties at that, instead of surgical regime change by the US? How would a regime change of the Mullahs equate to "redrawing borders?" No such thing happened when they were installed and won't need to happen now. Seems like that's what you are suggesting.
> How would a regime change of the Mullahs equate to "redrawing borders?"
It doesn’t. Maybe there is a Delcy Rodriguez in the IRGC. I’m doubtful. If there isn’t, we have the option of creating a power vacuum or quarantining the problem.
I’m arguing for the latter. The Azeri-majority northnorth to Azerbaijan; the Turkic areas to its west to Turkey [1]. Balochistani southeast to Pakistan. Arab southwest to Iraq. Hell, if you’re ambitious, find a way to give Bandar Abbas to the Emiratis and secure the Strait of Hormuz.
There's a widely popular Shah who is ready to take the helm, at least for a "transition" and that's what the majority seems to want in the protests. I'm certain given enough enticement from United States, we can easily find someone who is able and willing from the army or even an IRGC figure who would eagerly jump on the opportunity. Plus, you somehow think the Iranians would just roll with your whiteboard map? Even among the minorities--let alone the majority--you specified, it is not clear that separation is the predominant preference. Many of those plans may look attractive today to some simply because Islamic Republic has mismanaged the economy, not because there is no national bond. To boot, why would United States prefer to hand over such important region to arguably as bad or worse governing bodies like Pakistan, Taliban, or Iraq, and questionable partners like Turkey[1], rather than own Iran by installing its own preferred partner as an ally[1]? Are you delusional?
[1]: I won't be surprised if regime change will be coming for Erdogan not too far from now, after Iran is done.
[2]: If US really wants to shit on the region like that, there are various cards they could have played much easier: unleash groups like MEK/Kurds and start a civil war. So far, it does appear Israel/US behavior, like the way they conducted the 12 day war, is to keep Iran intact and does not mess with the balance of power in the region as much as possible.
> we can easily find someone who is able and willing from the army or even an IRGC figure who would eagerly jump on the opportunity
This is not the history of nation building.
> Even among the minorities--let alone the majority--you specified, it is not clear that separation is the predominant preference
They have insurgencies for a reason. Many of these groups were also promised some level of self governance, promises which have been trotted back.
> why would United States prefer to hand over such important region to arguably as bad or worse governing bodies like Pakistan, Taliban, or Iraq, and questionable partners like Turkey
Never said Taliban. We have influence over Iraq. And even Pakistan isn’t really fucking with American interests that much, and giving them Balochistan might help them with their anti-terror mission. (It would also piss off India. So maybe skip that, too.)
> to keep Iran intact and does not mess with the balance of power in the region as much as possible
I’m not suggesting this is currently U.S. strategy. I’m saying there are advantages to it over trying to do the Shah again. Namely, it shatters a regional problem more evenly and protects choke points around the Caspian and Strait of Hormuz.
Sure if you watch #AyatollahBBC or Democrat media who created the beast in the first place under Carter.
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The rest I will just let you wait and see... There may be some success on the Kurdish/Azeri separationist fronts, but there is less than zero chance Pakistan and Iraq could take over the rest of the country.
The majority of Iranians hate Pakistan and Arabs. The whole undercurrent of the protest is a nationalist movement to kick Islam and Arab culture out. You take a province here a province there; what to do with the rest?
> Sure if you watch #AyatollahBBC or Democrat media who created the beast in the first place under Carter
Non-English language assessments from countries in Europe or Asia that haven’t been calling theirq shots wrong in the Middle East for two generations.
I’m not saying we can conclude the Shah is unpopular. Just that we only have quality evidence that he is narrowly popular, and at that moreso abroad and in English-language press.
> You take a province here a province there; what to do with the rest?
Let them have their mullahs. (Or not.) Taliban has been fine from a regional-security perspective. So, increasingly, is Syria.
There's good reason to believe that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were essentially technical demonstrations warning the soviets, given the clearly imminent end of the war, to not start anything with us. There were already signs of a Japanese desire for surrender.
> There were already signs of a Japanese desire for surrender.
I'm no historian but this point doesn't sound very noteworthy unless it was the leadership who wanted that surrender. It took two bombs to make them surrender; they didn't surrender after the first.
Edit: actually this is much more nuanced than I think either of us make it sound. Japan did send out "peace feelers", but they were more like "we want peace but we don't accept your terms." The Japanese required that the US allow retention of the emperor, no occupation, self-conducted war crime trials, and even possibly keeping some of their conquered territory. The US wanted an unconditional surrender.
Well yes. The question is how many more would have had to die to get it. This question doesn’t have an easy answer. To the extent there are wrong ones, it’s anyone claiming confidence.
A nonsensical false dichotomy of sorts. Between "Japan surrenders without a single further death" and "We have to nuke two cities for them to surrender" there are numerous steps of gradual escalation that could have been taken before arriving at the "nuke the cities" option. One such possible step could have been nuking a remote area, or at the very least sparsely populated area, to achieve the demonstration of destruction without hundreds of thousands of deaths.
I have no sympathy for the Japanese who killed tens of millions of people in their WW2 atrocities, and the two bombs killed orders of magnitude fewer of their people. I also see no reason to pretend that there weren't obvious alternatives to USA dropping nukes on their cities if we are to believe that the objective was merely getting Japan to surrender (an objective most difficult to believe). No need for pretense -- they wanted to demonstrate their new weapons, AND they wanted to kill a lot of Japanese.
> One such possible step could have been nuking a remote area, or at the very least sparsely populated area, to achieve the demonstration of destruction without hundreds of thousands of deaths
There is a reason it took bombing both Hiroshima and Nagasaki to cause surrender. And if you telegraph that you’re going to bomb a remote place and the bomb fails, you’ve undermined your weapon’s credibility in unique ways.
I’m not saying you’re wrong. Just that your confidence is wrong. What you’re talking about was contemporaneously and continues to be historically debated.
> Furthermore they could have only destroyed only one city if Hiroshima had been an at sea demonstration instead, maybe even destroy zero cities.
Given the immediate response to Hiroshima was disbelief, surely an at-sea demonstration would have been even less convincing than the observable absence of a city?
Even once the Japanese government confirmed that Hiroshima had indeed been destroyed by a nuclear weapon, part of the reason Nagasaki followed Hiroshima was that the Japanese forces estimated the US couldn't have built more than one or two more (they were correct, they just hadn't internalised what losing an entire city meant).
Our Congress and Supreme Court are beholden to him. State and Individual resistance will be treated as rebellion. The legal pathways have us waiting until elections. The line of succession is GOP 40 levels deeps.
If we successfully revolt the US doesn't survive in any form to stabilize the world built around us and there is no guarantee that the ruling party isn't MAGA-like.
I hope you are right but I don't have any confidence in a Democratic party controlled Congress. I have never seen a meeker group of politicians. They will struggle to get everyone on board and some of them will defect and vote with Republicans like they did recently to end the government shutdown.
[1] https://lilibots.blogspot.com/2020/04/starlink-satellite-dim...
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