Twinkle, twinkle, little star…

If, in a couple of years, you were to look up at the night sky and, seeing a large number of shiny twinkling objects, conclude that they were stars, you would most certainly be wrong. More likely, they will be privately-owned satellites sent into orbit by a handful of companies such as Amazon. Yes, the same Amazon that wants to sell you, here on earth, all kinds of shiny objects. The same Amazon which managed to obtain, in a record 11 days apparently, all the necessary permits to build a 3-million square-foot office campus in Hyderabad. I wonder how long it takes for an Indian citizen to obtain an official birth certificate in Cyberabad without greasing any palms!

In a headlong rush to capitalise on a projected $3 trillion space-based economy, companies in the US and UK are planning to launch nearly 40,000 satellites in the next two years. You worry about the damage to the environment and current social order that it will cause? Ah, buzz off, says Bezos.

On top of the 3,274 satellites it has permission to launch, Amazon has sought US approval to launch 4,500 more to “serve households, hospitals, businesses, government agencies, and other organisations around the world, including in geographic areas where reliable broadband remains lacking.” And Astra Space Inc. wants approval to launch 13,620 satellites to provide “communications services, environmental and natural resource applications, and national security missions.” Astra’s stated mission is “to improve life on Earth from space by creating a healthier and more connected planet.”

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In a November 2021 op-ed piece in the Washington Post, Gen. J W Raymond, who commanded the US Space Force at the time, noted that the US wanted to collaborate with like-minded spacefaring nations such as Britain and Germany to establish international norms and rules for responsible behaviour in space, given that Russia and China had demonstrated their anti-satellite missile capability. It essentially means that a group of executives from western IT companies will be crafting the rules to control space-based commerce. This is analogous to intellectual property rules created in the 1990s by representatives of the software, pharmaceutical, and entertainment industries in the US and enforced by the World Trade Organisation.

I assume Amazon’s broadband customers will include the 3 billion people who have never been on the internet (per 2021 UN statistics), almost all of whom reside in rural areas in the global south. When they do get connected to the web, their rooftops will sport dish antennas and the home pages on their digital devices will be Amazon’s home page, to lure them into the joys of online shopping, streaming video, and same-day delivery. Since Amazon acquired Facebook’s satellite team, these new customers don’t need to worry about Facebook collecting their data; Amazon is equally good, if not better, at that.

When Amazon does provide global broadband access to the internet through satellites, it will also be setting up numerous remote earth stations and massive data centres, both of which will require enormous amounts of electricity, part of which will be solar-powered, the rest fossil fuel-based. Even the solar ones, irrespective of whether they use silicon cells or gallium arsenide (a by-product of aluminium ore) cells, have large energy requirements, contributing to CO2 emissions.

As millions of new customers from Africa and Asia get ensnared by e-commerce, since using a variety of local currencies would tend to detract from the shopping experience, why not have everything paid for by cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin? Never mind the environmental and energy costs involved in bitcoin mining. Makes global book-keeping easier, I am sure. In case you haven’t heard, in parallel with the COP21 climate conference, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (a consortium of 751 private financial institutions from the US, EU, Japan and Korea) was also convened to enforce its diktats on the rest of the world.

To reduce cooling costs and promote itself as a green company, Microsoft is currently experimenting with building data centres on the ocean floor. Sounds fishy? The likes of Amazon will surely follow in its footsteps, no doubt. Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are!