(FIXED)The vast majority of our stratosphere isn’t polluted by satellites - airborne communications stations will change that

Oh yeah, let's build our infrastructure project based on tech that requires a large amount of helium. You know, that element that is extremely hard to store and transport. Yes, the one that's already scarce and is required for vastly more important technologies.

I don't see what the problem is, it's not like helium production is a byproduct of an energy sector were trying to rapidly divest from......

Problem is that a lot of that remaining third live in countries where the state will actively try to destroy the air craft to keep their people insulated from the wider global internet

Anyone else remember Google(Alphabet)'s "Project Loon?" It was just like this but it failed.

Read more: Wikipedia Loon website

The router crashed will become far more literal than it previously was.

And food, but let's get Internet first to ask them if they're hungry.

Land cables are not that expensive.

Unless your population is incredibly sparse, land fiber or adsl cables are the way to go.

I live in a region which have 25 hab/km^2 which is one of the lowest in the world. And we have a massive cable implementation that covers more than 95% of the population.

The problem is money. And if you don't have money for cable you don't have money for XVIII century internet carrying blimps.

Orrrrrrrr......hear me out.......

We ALL just stop. We say no to these overinflated bundle prices, we say no to corporate censorship, we say no to the human trafficing. Elon musk will have paid 43 BILLION dollars for.......nothing.

This has been a popsci fantasy for a quarter of a century or more. Google tried it and gave up.

Many years ago my grandfather was involved in an air force test of aerial defense platforms that used balloons.

The idea was you could station these things all around the country and at the first sign of an attack you could have missiles launched from 10k feet to anywhere from anywhere.

The test encountered two problems that caused them to abandon the idea.

These balloons were incredibly easy to shoot down. Which would, presumably, rain volatile rocket fuel and munitions down on whatever was beneath them.

And if a missile launched, but failed to separate completely from it's housing, it would carry that balloon on a wild, unpredictable trajectory, until it collided with something or it decided it had reached it's detonation time.

Besides the cost of terminals, this problem has been solved by starlink and soon project kuiper.

I guess that's fine but you also have to teach people how to use the internet.

If people are from a culture that typically doesn't have internet access then they're not really going to understand what they can do with it.