So I was thinking about skylink this morning (one of spacex/teslas/elons babies)
Photo by Forest Katsch on Unsplash — The Starlink 3 train rides across the early morning sky, accompanied by a handful of other satellites.
The more satellites that they throw up, the better the network gets, in terms of spread anyway because your not waiting for a satellite to be over head, at least the hand off to the next one is where the latency will be, they say it’s gonna be 20ms in version one which is pretty damn great if you ask me, it’s not really to be “gaming” on yet but hey, it got me thinking about sensor data and IoT which I expect will explode in popularity.
I’ve alway thought that elon got inspired by the satellite network in antitrust the film where they have this global satellite system that spans the world and they use the protocol to relay video and information across the planet to all devices.. It’s a bit more sinister in that film because the main guy ends up putting fibre cameras into the homes of programmers and stealing code — not to different from the bitcoin crooks stealing money out of the system to fund other ventures really.
Anyway, back to the point of this post.. .. on twitter I wrote this today. .
hey @elonmusk when starlink is everywhere, and you have all those sats up there are you gonna then turn the whole global fleet of Tesla cars into an active global sensor network of local air quality + providing free internet access? maybe hotspot mesh networking mqtt brokers too?
Sensor data, I mean we are gonna start to see the mothballing of 2G applications globally fairly soon as soon as 5g starts it’s run, those at the other other of the spectrum on those low packet size 2g networks are gonna start to look around for other options.
But also, I was thinking that maybe elon could have developed in a master stroke by developing starlink. I mean, really, who is it for? Was it because he needed to have a regular reason to be throwing satellites up there, what’s the impact on the ecosystem every time we do that?
I totally see a day when we get a news/press briefing where all Tesla owners automatically get free connectivity from starlink, but further than that, consider how that ties together everything else that they build, it’s a smart engineered utopian vision of a connected home — from the solar, to the car, to the potential of opening that up to local mesh networks and localised sensors, building on top of that resource could have huge local and global ramifications.
It blows my mind that we have moved on so far in our species when I was a teenager waiting two weeks to get my post back from canada (penpals) to the world we have today where we can bounce and receive messages from satellites as part of our regular joe infrastructure.
We are already living in the future and it feels like we are the ones that are playing catchup on the world events, everything appears to getting faster and faster but in some ways I’m glad that we have the foresight to build in such wonderful life altering technology that’s going to be second nature in the years to come.
I wonder how earth is going to look when we have 10,000 of those satellites spinning around the globe, imagine those people getting connected for the first time, maybe we will have starlink ready phones or mifi devices, what happens when the world is truly all connected and we can transmit and receive value from each other based on data driven actions.
It’s really exciting for someone who is really interested in technology. Instead of just a few billion of us that’s connected already, imagine ten billion people connected in some way to the global pulse of the planet, reacting in real time, to relatively realtime data, making crop decisions in a field in Pakistan regarding food outputs to marine data of incoming storms.
The potential of all of these things, makes me feel a little like the scenes in oblivion, the film with tom cruise where he and his work partner daily go and check in on these massive units that are processing sea water, maybe the future of planet will be all of us actively doing our bit in hotspots to do more as a global citizen to bring balance.
Who knows, certainly makes me aware and excited about a potential future if we can get there, data driven lives that make a real difference to the way we live and our neighbours around us.
Have a great week!
__humble x
