This is a tradeoff we have to make with infrastructure and development in general. How do you balance human needs with pristine nature?
Do we put up long-distance power lines and wind farms even though they ruin the views? Do you tear down a forest to put up farmlands and suburbs? Do you build a dam to provide water for irrigation, even though it kills the fish and floods a valley?
Satellites are actually easier than most of those tradeoffs, because nothing lives in space and there's no nature to destroy. It only affects us.
And who decides which satellites are approved? Is there a quota per country? Per capita? If a country declines to participate, do we count their satellites?
Centralized control from a benevolent dictator sounds great as a first approximation but rarely survives diving into the details.
They won't ignore it if Americans and Europeans agree to contribute their fair share to the well-being of all the people and stop hoarding all the world's wealth to themselves. A situation where the minimum wage in some regions of the US is over $15, while in parts of India have the median wage is less than 50 cents, is an unjust absurdity.
India having a wage of 50 cent is somehow America's fault? They failed to develop their infrastructure, and as a result their economy. That's their fault, nobody else's.
Look, I'm not suggesting we do anything bad to Americans and Europeans. Just let them pay their fair share to those they've driven into poverty.
Or do you enjoy the suffering of billions of people working for less than 50 cents? Americans and Europeans only need to share with them what is let say above $5, and then we can get almost $2 for EVERY worker on Earth.
It is necessary to at least slightly limit one’s greed and show compassion to other people who are in an extremely vulnerable position.
The purpose of most of these satellites is internet access where we already have less limited possibilities with less maintenance costs like constant replacement
> Asteroids with a diameter more than 30–50 metres (100–150ft) are large enough to make it through our atmosphere intact, however, and the chance of this happening is estimated to be around once in every 100 years.
> The damage from an impact of this size would be wide-ranging, and could wipe out an entire city if they were to impact a heavily populated area.
We lack the technology to detect this size of asteroid with enough time to do anything about it.
Luckily, the majority of the earth's surface is unpopulated. Most of these rocks hit the ocean or Siberia and cause few or no casualties. The odds of it hitting a major city are quite low.
That "if it hits a populated area" reduces the probability by a factor 100 (because about 1% of the world's surface is urbanized [1]).
So the actual frequency of "city wiped" is more like once every 10000 years. Completely negligible compared to other city-wiping events (earthquakes or floods for example).
> These proposals, combined with others considered in the study, would dramatically brighten the night sky, hindering humankind’s ability to observe faint cosmic targets, including far-away galaxies, some Earth-like planets around other stars, and even asteroids potentially dangerous to Earth.
Do we put up long-distance power lines and wind farms even though they ruin the views? Do you tear down a forest to put up farmlands and suburbs? Do you build a dam to provide water for irrigation, even though it kills the fish and floods a valley?
Satellites are actually easier than most of those tradeoffs, because nothing lives in space and there's no nature to destroy. It only affects us.