this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
7 points (100.0% liked)

AskBeehaw

2037 readers
2 users here now

An open-ended community for asking and answering various questions! Permissive of asks, AMAs, and OOTLs (out-of-the-loop) alike.

In the absence of flairs, questions requesting more thought-out answers can be marked by putting [SERIOUS] in the title.


Subcommunity of Chat


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Lately I have been thinking a bit about how commercial and governmental satellites impact my life, so that I'm mentally prepared for life if they end service. This isn't a doomer post, it's solar punk or whatever. Practical.

The first time I remember interacting with a commercial satellite was in the late 2000s when I got a device with GPS. I don't entirely know how satellites are involved in my current cellphone, but I know it does use them for GPS. Never had sat TV or sat Home Internet.

  • The internet would still exist, people would have less access though especially in remote places

  • Weather Service would be impacted, I think? But much of that is also done with radar.

  • I don't know anything about air traffic control! Does that have satellites?

  • Those ugly TV dishes would still be ugly, but maybe they could be ugly spider plant planters or something.

  • I don't care about how nations spy on each other, but it's funny to me that would be impacted.

What about your individual experience? What about the world experience am I missing?

*edit 1 Apparently it would mess up crop rotation in a lot of places and environmental monitoring would be broadly impacted.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago

The absence of GPS would collapse the world economy.