The question was about sea level rise.

If the rising waters coincide with other climatic events, such as rainstorms and high tides, the phenomenon could swallow beaches, chew away bluffs and coastlines

There is a narrative that oh, a few cm of sea level rise is no problem, it's just a little higher water. It isn't.

However, the kinds of multi-million-dollar mansions that celebrities buy aren't the rickety perched-on-the-edge-of-a-crumbling bluff houses built in the 30s and 40s. They tend to be built-by-high-priced-architects homes that had civil engineers to advise about the stability of the foundation.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cbc.ca%2Fnews%2Fentert...

If AI is ruled a serious risk that requires a government kill switch you won't be running any open weights models on hardware you control. I expect that's what the FSF is afraid of. That's why they refer to it as hypothetical technology as in "assuming such a kill switch was developed".

It might seem far fetched but consider that you are probably (based on the American readership of this site):

- not permitted to buy more than a few grams of effective cold medication per day and have to show ID, which goes in a tracking system, in order to do so.

- while you are allowed to purchase microcontrollers, if you install this on them they are illegal to possess

- possession or use of all manner of chemicals, combinations of chemicals and shaped metal considered dangerous will get you prosecuted with various degrees of zeal

The big AI companies, who already possess the most effective possible actual kill switches, seem oddly enthusiastic about the whole thing.

Not just downlink, but the inter-satellite bandwidth and latency is also likely to be a problem. I saw an analysis of what it would take to build a big datacentre, and there the cooling really does become a problem. Not the radiators so much as the plumbing to move the heat around. So everyone is talking about lots of little satellites, but that means you're restricted to a handful of cards locally. It's going to restrict the kinds of jobs you can do when the next rack over is a thousand kilometres away.

For comparison, Starlink V3 satellites have a solar array wingspan of 70 meters.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cctvmanuals.com%2F20...
See also https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgrokipedia.com%2Fpage%2FSt...

They are, of course, technology that is about 40 years later than the ISS design

The GP is correct, and you're misinterpreting the financial filing.

The industry widely acknowledges that SpaceX's economics are lucrative. Their marginal cost is an est. $15-25m/flight, vs. a typical commercial contract price of ~$65M and a NASA contract price of ~$100-150M. The small (as a percentage) GAAP operating loss on the launch segment is driven by two factors:

1) Starship development. That falls under the launch segment. Starship development is draining an insane amount of money (~$3B/yr), while earning zero revenue.

2) Internal launches. 3/4ths of Falcon launches are to launch Starlink. This books zero revenue for SpaceX launch services.

The fact that the loss is only ~$1/2B despite these massive leaches on profitability is specifically because Falcon launches are so profitable.

As for your claim that Starlink is "only making money due to free launches", no. Starlink generated $11,4B with $4,4B GAAP in 2025. Merely sum the Starlink GAAP profit and the launch GAAP loss and you'll see nearly $4B in GAAP profit, and that's including the huge drain caused by Starship development costing $3B/yr. Without Starship, the two combined would be turning nearly $7B GAAP profit.

The main leach in corporate profitability has nothing to do with space: it's xAI. They had an operating loss of $6,36B in 2025.

To be clear, it needs to get safely to orbit to be seen as reliable for launches. It doesn't need to make it back safely.

I'll take Things That Never Happened for $1000, Ken.

Meanwhile in reality:

1) It was not a case of "WorldVu approached SpaceX looking to purchase rocket launches". Musk and Wyler had been working through all of 2014 on a joint venture. They explored building a joint satellite manufacturing facility and were scouting locations in Florida and Colorado. The talks broke down (Wyler thought Musk's Starlink plan was too ambitious, Musk thought Wyler's wasn't ambitious enough (too expensive satellites, too primitive/conservative tech, too small in number); SpaceX also thought Wyler wanted too much equity ) and each went their own way - SpaceX in-house, WorldVu partnering with Virgin Group and Qualcomm. The former succeeded massively.

2) NEITHER SpaceX nor WorldVu came up with the idea; it was well known in the space industry for decades. It had already had startups try, starting with Teledesic (backed by Gates) in the 1990s. Other smaller LEO constellations like Iridium and Globalstar were already operational. The main scale and price limitations were launch costs, which weren't resolved until the Falcon in the 2010s.

3) SpaceX was already eyeing satellite communications before the JV with WorldVu.. As early as 2004, they hired Larry Williams (of Teledesic) and bought a 10% stake in Surrey Satellite Technology, specifically to explore space-based internet concepts. What WorldVu brought to the table wasn't "the idea of satellite constellations" at all: they owned priority spectrum rights. *That* is what SpaceX wanted from the JV. Not "OMG, this customer has a brilliant idea for a satellite constellation that we never thought of!!!" Wyler had bought Ku-band spectrum from the ITU that was originally allocated to a different defunct 1990s venture, SkyBridge.

That's how it already works.

It's not. Full disk access is sticky. When you grant it, the app has it until you go into settings and revoke it. It's not like sudo, it's like running that app as root, with no permission required after the first time. On Linux to get the same effect you have to edit a text file with root permissions and give the program passwordless sudo privileges, which should make any competent Linux users' hair stand on end.

And the next step will be "See, we can't allow full disk access." And then macOS will cease to be usable.

People have been "predicting" this slippery slope thing for ages and it hasn't happened.

These satellites would be in LEO

Sort of. They'd be in probably lowish sun synchronous dawn-dusk orbits, a narrow band following the terminator where the sun always shines.

and fall back to Earth after 5 years anyway.

Yeah. Thus "you generally need to rebuild your entire infrastructure... every five years or so."

The server hardware will be obsolete by then anyway.

The server hardware maybe. Not the power plant, (extensive) cooling hardware, infrastructure. These aren't GPUs floating in space, they're the entire computing, communications, cooling, power etc. infrastructure. The every five years thing would be like building a datacentre and everything supporting it in the middle of the desert and then nuking it every five years and starting over from absolute scratch.

If the cost to orbit is low enough, and there are no land taxes or electricity costs in space, and it solves the locality and latency issues for them, it starts to make more sense.

The cost to orbit, whatever it is, is pretty much money on top of whatever it would cost to build in a remote location on the surface. Taxes are minimal, zero or sometimes effectively negative for remote development on Earth. If you want to build a datacentre in the middle of the Sahara you can probably convince Morocco or someone to give you money. Solar panels are bit more efficient in space, and you get to use the 24 hours a day, but you also have to toss them every five years and buy (and launch) new ones. Along with everything else. And latency is going to be worse, not better. Your servers are whipping around the planet in polar orbits on the terminator. The minimum distance they are from any point on the surface is going to be about 300 km and that's going to occur for a few minutes a couple times a day. Most of the time they're going to be half the planet away.

I watched Scott Manley's video when it came out. He's right, the technical issues everyone seems to focus on aren't great, but they really aren't that bad. The economic and latency issues are the killers.

As far as I can tell nobody really has any consistent idea what "kill switch" is supposed to mean. Eg. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.scientificamerican...

OpenAI and Anthropic already have kill switches, from the power cord through to account bans. If they don't want anyone using their model they can do that. Likewise, if the US government is sufficiently motivated to order a service provider to stop providing that service, they can absolutely do that. I get the feeling the actual companies are hoping they can implement something that has lots of buzzwords and does sort of what their "guard rails" do, and everyone will stop bugging them about it.

Naturally the FSF imagines some hypothetical technology that allows the government to reach into your home to shut off the matrix multiplies running on your own computer.

** "because of its high vaccination coverage"

Excellent pedantism sir!

Not everyone shares your personal passtimes.

Technology isn't really the problem. We've got most or all the technology to do what the GP suggested. What we lack are engineering experience, infrastructure and good economic reasons to do it.

Europe had all the technology required to build a casino in the Nevada desert in the 16th century, but it took four hundred years to get around to building the first one in Las Vegas.