You'd need like 12,000 kg of plutonium 238, more than has ever been usefully produced, from an enormous nuclear production infrastructure that doesn't exist yet, all for a price that's three or four orders of magnitude bigger than for a similar number of square meters of solar panels. Anti nuclear people aren't your problem here.
What they provide is a service that's already widely available in first world countries, and is seeing rapid increase in availability in third world countries (well, most of them, the US seems to be stagnant).
This has been a thing since the dawn of space travel. These at least provide a service that most people would benefit from, either directly through service or indirectly through increased competition.
Honestly, I think more people enjoy watching Iridium satellites than are perturbed by them.
We’re not talking about pollution in the sense of significant changes in the brightness of the night sky (as we are with true light pollution from cities). We’re talking about the fact that they’re detectable with the naked eye.
If all the Starlink satellites are this bright, the night sky will have more Starlink satellites than visible stars.
That and people using the service, even solely receiving can be tracked
Or those, with prices around 50usd/gb: https://www.vsat-systems.com/service-offerings/VAR-VNO-Deale...
Even if Starlink is 10x cheaper than existing VSAT it does not come even close to LTE cost. And we have 5g on the horizon.
This three orders of magnitude difference in cost can be expected to be reflected in the price of the service.
Starlink and others are likely to significantly improve on that, too. Fundamental costs (especially for later versions) are cents per GB or lower, competitive with AWS transit fees.
(look for "data cap") ...note that, for instance, the $50/month plan goes up to $70 after 3 months. But the data cap of 40GB is a soft cap.
And illuminating all of earth? I don't want to imagine the damage that would cause to ecosystems. It would completely take away peoples' choice not to live in a place with street lighting, or even to have a vacation in such a place. Street lighting is bad enough for peoples' circadian rhythms as is.
Not all, and probably as little as one or two species.
Not necessarily. With Adaptive Optics, ground based telescopes are getting incredible results. Also, they can build much larger primary mirrors on the ground than what can be lofted into space. Ground based telescopes also have the ability to be updated/upgraded/fixed/etc.