Everything is more meaningful, do you mean? In developed countries, agriculture is highly automated, and if you want a hobby garden in your leisure time, you can choose how much automation you want.
Yes. Space manufacturing is the way. Launching everything from down here is madness, constructing telescopes in high lands down here is madness too, those are local minimas. We should be laser 3D printing bunch of self replicating cylinder objects out of Lunar regolith. I don't know why we're not doing it if it weren't for the sole possibility that US Space Force don't have intercept capability for such tubes gone rogue.
SpaceX and trailing competitors are trying to make it cheap enough to get stuff out of the gravity well (including people and our more advanced products) that more permanent installations other places can get started. Elon says Mars a lot, probably because it's popular with the public. It's still expensive to send things up a gravity well, even if it's less expensive. The moon is shallow by comparison, and the asteroid belt far away but barely a dip. It would be safest to send robots first, bootstrap an installation that can manufacture local propulsion of any sort, O2, water, maybe even refine useful building materials, metal, or other resources. Anything so less is sent up.
Hopefully among all those things would also be materials to make large mirrors (optical and other portions of the EM spectrum), in less gravity, where it's cheaper to move them to useful areas of space, or even just truck them to spots around the surface of the moon.
One word: mining. The moon has literal tons of helium-3 that, if brought back to Earth, would tank the market. yes it's a bit capital intensive too get started but the payoff is huge! Just need to borrow the particle physicists' budget for a second.
"Just need to borrow the particle physicist's budget for a second."
I don't think thats enough and I also don't think the market for Helium-3 is that lucrative, since comercial fusion is for some reasons still not in sight.
Apollo took 9 years and about $25 billion to get there, so we can treat that as an upper limit. However, the Capstop cubesat just reached the moon[0] for $30 million[1] so the roughly $5 Billion for the LHC should be enough to get us to the moon these days. And there's plenty of aluminum and titanium to bring back until commercial fusion arrives.
They will continue to whine until all observation is done from outer space.
On the one hand, it's good to have a reminder as it's important that interference with terrestrial astronomy is taken into account when designing new space missions. On the other hand, the degree to which the whining is being amplified by doing it in news articles gives it a bit of "shitting where you sleep" quality - my feeling is they're already quite successfully souring the nascent space industry to the general population, which is extremely counterproductive long-term, especially for people whose fields' existence depends pretty much entirely on goodwill and surplus funding.
In other words: excessive whining about space utilization will not stop launches of telecom satellites and subsequent light and radio pollution, but it may very well make it so no one will have the will and the spare cash to fund the next space-based telescope.
As a sibling comment pointed out, most people impacted by this will be amateur astronomers, and, you know, casual star gazers.
Secondly, this isn't "souring the space industry". LEO satellites mostly serve terrestrial companies and governments, where they're used for military, communication, and, increasingly, other commercial purposes. The complaints aren't about space tourism projects or launching a few space telescopes; they're about launching thousands of satellites, and fueling the commercialization of LEO, where the sky will eventually be littered by these things. We're at the very early stages of this, and individuals are already voicing concerns about it. I hope this "whining" continues, as I sure as hell don't want to also see ads when I look up into the sky.
Except most organizations can barely afford their ground-based observatories as it is, so to think you can chuck enough capacity into orbit to compensate even a fraction of it for anywhere close in budget is wishful thinking.
It will be a nuisance for amateur astronomers too (for astro-photography people anyway), since they are more likely to take wide-angle shots (increasing likelihood of bright transient in shot) and have less technical means to compensate for it.
And they certainly don't have the budget to launch their own satellites..
That is certainly the prevalent narrative and yet we've got roughly 4.5 billion years to solve the sun-eating-the-earth problem. Shitting on our dominant modes of asteroid detection to try to compete for saturated market space (cell service are you fucking kidding me) advances no species preservation goals.
I found the article to be irrelevant and only clicked the link because I thought I was going to find a technical reason as to why the .io domain would be considered harmful. Instead I found an author's opinion as to why the .io domain would be considered harmful to the author and other's who would share the author's concerns which are not technical in nature.
Title is click-bait, article has no impact on my decision making process when purchasing TLDs.
