As far as I know, a proposal that involves launching several new satellites will cost on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars (please correct me if the relevant hardware is cheaper in this case). As far as I know, hundreds of millions of dollars of medical spending even in some of the developed world can save thousands of lives.
So you really need to demonstrate the expected number of lives saved would be quite large. This seems to depend on some very strong claims about the availability of cell service. Do you have estimates of the number of people unserved by existing infrastructure, or who are unlikely to be served by infrastructure in the near future? Is there some reason that infrastructure will be unavailable in the case of disaster?
This could be the difference between a genocide going unreported, and being deterred.
This seems unlikely at face value. I have never heard of a situation in the modern world where there was complete information scarcity, such that isolated individual phone calls would significantly improve the situation. I have never seen any evidence that isolated reports of genocide have any positive effect as a deterrent. Could you describe in more detail the sort of situation you envision, or point to the evidence that led you to make this claim? (I am quite ignorant about these issues, so could be easily convinced by learning more.)
I have never heard of a situation in the modern world where there was complete information scarcity, such that isolated individual phone calls would significantly improve the situation.
If I were looking for such evidence (as I would be if I were making the proposal you are discussing) I would expect to be able to find it. Since I’ve never seen such evidence, presenting it to me would be a very good idea; if this is recognized and no evidence is forthcoming, I’d assume that there is none.
I place very low probability on the existence of significant political events whose occurrence is completely unknown to the world at large for many years. I can imagine lots of pieces of evidence that could cause me to update this belief.
As far as I know, a proposal that involves launching several new satellites will cost on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars (please correct me if the relevant hardware is cheaper in this case). As far as I know, hundreds of millions of dollars of medical spending even in some of the developed world can save thousands of lives.
So you really need to demonstrate the expected number of lives saved would be quite large. This seems to depend on some very strong claims about the availability of cell service. Do you have estimates of the number of people unserved by existing infrastructure, or who are unlikely to be served by infrastructure in the near future? Is there some reason that infrastructure will be unavailable in the case of disaster?
This seems unlikely at face value. I have never heard of a situation in the modern world where there was complete information scarcity, such that isolated individual phone calls would significantly improve the situation. I have never seen any evidence that isolated reports of genocide have any positive effect as a deterrent. Could you describe in more detail the sort of situation you envision, or point to the evidence that led you to make this claim? (I am quite ignorant about these issues, so could be easily convinced by learning more.)
Would you have, if there were?
If I were looking for such evidence (as I would be if I were making the proposal you are discussing) I would expect to be able to find it. Since I’ve never seen such evidence, presenting it to me would be a very good idea; if this is recognized and no evidence is forthcoming, I’d assume that there is none.
I place very low probability on the existence of significant political events whose occurrence is completely unknown to the world at large for many years. I can imagine lots of pieces of evidence that could cause me to update this belief.