pietroq

Fun fact: Turbo Pascal was 38KB and that included the editor, compiler and debugger. It was lightning fast, compiling 10s of kSLOC in mere seconds on a 4.77MHz single-thread 8088 with 640KB of RAM. Now to build a Hello World full stack web app it can take 10+ minutes on a modern PC with 4GHz 16 core CPU and 64GB of RAM :)

"Only the paranoid survives" - Andy Grove

SpaceX is at the moment the only feasible enabler of humanity as an interplanetary species. Their deeds can open up a new economic growth regime that has no practical upper limit, we can expand to trillions of people in the solar system. You really cannot price this properly. No single company was so pivotal in the history of humanity.

In the nineties (1990-1999) we had a distribution deal in the USA with the PowerUp! catalog for a software product that moved a few millions of copies. Of the $24.99 sticker price we received something like $0.80 and that was an USA-only deal. Giving 30% for a worldwide deal when the distributor takes care of all the billing and taxing and accounting and distribution is the deal of the century.

Looks like you have never done computers. It is trivial to substract the well known light effect of the sat.

Let's put this to rest for once and all. The average radius of Earth is 6,371 km. Initial sats will be at 550 km height (many will be higher, many somewhat lower, but does not make much diff.) So the surface of the 6,931km radius globe is ~603,672,875 km2 (~604 million square kilometers). Don't have exact size for a Starlink sat, but a good upper bound is 3 x 2 m, i.e. 6 m2 = 0.000006 km2. Let's say there will be 40,000 such sats at peak, so altogether they occupy 0.24 km2 area. Altogether, they will occupy 0.00000003976% of the sky. QED.