Lately I have been thinking a bit about how commercial and governmental satellites impact my life, so that I’m mentally prepared for life if they end service. This isn’t a doomer post, it’s solar punk or whatever. Practical.
The first time I remember interacting with a commercial satellite was in the late 2000s when I got a device with GPS. I don’t entirely know how satellites are involved in my current cellphone, but I know it does use them for GPS. Never had sat TV or sat Home Internet.
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The internet would still exist, people would have less access though especially in remote places
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Weather Service would be impacted, I think? But much of that is also done with radar.
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I don’t know anything about air traffic control! Does that have satellites?
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Those ugly TV dishes would still be ugly, but maybe they could be ugly spider plant planters or something.
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I don’t care about how nations spy on each other, but it’s funny to me that would be impacted.
What about your individual experience? What about the world experience am I missing?
*edit 1 Apparently it would mess up crop rotation in a lot of places and environmental monitoring would be broadly impacted.
That’s an interesting question. On an individual scale it would probably take a while before you see any significant effect. A lot of apps like Uber or Doordash would probably be completely out. Amazon and other delivery services would also be completely out, they are 100% reliant on GPS signal. On a global scale most freight and major transportation services by boats or planes would be highly disrupted. Yes you can navigate a ship or fly a plane without GPS, but the entire system is reliant on GPS and transponders which are linked by satellite connections (IIRC, don’t cite me on this). This means we would go back 50 years but with today’s traffic, so good luck with that!
For communication satellites, many remote regions would be completely cut off from the rest of the world, but most cities wouldn’t be impacted at all.
One thing that we don’t often think about is weather forecasting, it is highly reliant on satellite imagery and it has been for a long time.
And I for one would probably be out of a job… Most of my job consists of analyzing satellite and drone imagery. Modern drones need GPS signal to plan autonomous flight missions, so we would need to rely on our very inacurrate manual flying skills.