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.

  • memfree@beehaw.orgEnglish
    2·
    5 days ago

    There’s a lot of news and programming on the radio and TV I would not have seen in the 70s and 80s without networks using satellites to bounce signals across continents and oceans. I’m pretty sure there were phone calls I could not have made in those decades without satellites.

    I’m not sure if we have enough intercontinental cables across the seafloors to handle all the traffic if satellites didn’t exist – heck, I’m not even sure if networks like BBC or NBC still use satellites to send their tv/radio signals to distant lands. The thing is they used to and I’m sure it mattered to me in ways I didn’t particularly notice at the time.

    A quick search didn’t find great references (so many links on current satellite tech that the old tech seems buried) , but see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telstar#In_service and maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelsat_I

    Edit: comm satellite firsts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_communications_satellite_firsts