I recently had a gig collecting soil samples in rural Alberta, and we relied on Starlink to upload the data as we worked.[0]
It was surreal trundling through a remote farmer’s field in a skid-steer with a funny-looking square dish on top, surrounded by a herd of bison or cattle.
Stepping outside of the machine to take a piss on a tree and hearing the motors in the dish whir as it repositions itself to get a better connection was startling and neat. It’s one thing to read about the dishes having that functionality but another to experience it while you’re doing something as mundane as a basic bodily function.
Pulling the dish and the mount off the skid-steer and tossing it in the back of the truck, and seeing the off-the-shelf Ryobi battery and inverter that powered it, all scuffed up and covered in dirt, makes you realize that as magical as it is right now, it’s just a machine. People thought that transistor radios were pretty magical when they came out but eventually they just became an everyday thing.
Soon enough these things won’t be so big and expensive, and there will be a market of providers offering even better service. What comes then will be scary from a privacy perspective, but it may also enable so many positive things that we can’t yet imagine.
“The most profound technologies are those that disappear.”