Brian, are you guys part of that teleplegic thingy? Is teleplegic,the polish answer to communications? How many russian engineers does it take to put up a satellite? 1,000, 1 to hold down the rocket,and 999 to pull back the giant slingshot.
I thought you would get a kick out of this.
To badly paraphrase the Bible: "He who lives by the chip shall die by the chip."
by Dr. Athelstan Zeitgeist
I used to work for a company that was entirely dependent on a satellite called Galaxy-4. It still is. Too bad it had all its eggs in one basket. Sucks to be them.
Galaxy-4 suffered a catastrophic failure this week, and has now been declared "dead" by its owner, PanAmSat. The failure led to a national pager outage of mammoth proportions, knocking TV and radio networks off line, all but killing UPI wire service to thousands of customers (including NetRadio Network) and generally giving everyone involved the crappiest weekday morning they have had in a long, long time.
Too many people dependent on a VW Beetle-sized can spinning 23,000 miles out in space. What happened? How did we get this way?
Simple - unlike the self-healing Internet, satellite technology is fragile, easily broken and super-expensive. And, when human beings began realizing Arthur C. Clarke's post-war vision in the 1960s, using orbital satellites for communications, there was little thought given to the implications for change this development presented, nor was there a realization of how tenuous our hold on everyday functions would become by putting our tools so far away - so far away we can't fix them when they break.
Unfortunately this is only the beginning. The failure of G-4 is a good precursor to what will probably happen in November of this year. At that time, the Earth will orbit through the remnants of an old comet, the result being what we know as the Leonid meteor shower. Pretty to look at from the planet's surface -- but deadly.
Every 30 years or so, Earth's orbit hits the center of this patch of rocks, pebbles and dust, and the planet gets pounded. Fortunately, we sit under several miles of atmosphere which deflects or burns off most of these celestial missles. Our satellites are not so lucky. Face it - you wouldn't work very well after being hit by a grain of sand traveling at 20,000 miles per hour, and neither will a delicate piece of unshielded electronics.
Forget "Deep Impact." Forget "Armageddon." That's fantasy time. In reality, major chaos is just around the corner, falling one grain of sand at a time, so get your backup systems ready before it's too late.
It's just another example of humans getting ahead of themselves and leaving their technological fly open.
The Millenium is still comin' atcha. Prepare to answer - or have the Universe answer for you.
Anyone of these companies ever figured out what would happen to them if prices drop? Or are all their models predicated on the same foolish assumption,of stable prices for the next 300 years. I think McCaw went McCack.
Hiram |
