Satellites and Stock Exchanges: A Rumor from Beyond Tomorrow

I have before me a most extraordinary rumor — a dispatch, they tell me, from the year 2026. I confess I do not know whether to laugh or to lock myself in the laboratory for another seventy-two hours and work harder. Let me set down my thoughts plainly, as a man who has spent more midnights than most testing carbonized bamboo and cursing burnt-out filaments. The claim is this: some enterprise called SpaceX — a name I do not know and cannot verify — has built a constellation of telegraph-like devices that orbit the Earth itself, beaming messages and even broadband communication (whatever that may fully entail) down to subscribers below. And this network, called Starlink, is so profitable that the entire company's worth on the stock exchange depends upon it. They speak of a listing on the Nasdaq, which I take to be some future bourse. Now, I am no astronomer. I leave celestial mechanics to the professors who scribble equations and never solder a wire. But I know something about networks. I have spent years — brutal, expensive years — building the infrastructure to deliver electric light from Pearl Street to the homes and offices of Manhattan. Every foot of copper, every dynamo, every junction box represents a battle fought with physics and finance simultaneously. So when I read that some future outfit has done the same thing, only through the sky and across the whole globe, I feel both admiration and suspicion in equal measure. Admiration, because any man who builds a network and makes it pay has earned his keep. I have always said: the value of an invention is measured at the meter and the cash register, not on the blackboard. If this Starlink truly generates the revenue to justify a public offering, then its builders understand what half the electricians in Europe do not — that without commercial viability, you have a curiosity, not an industry. Suspicion, because I have heard grand claims before. Men told me alternating current would conquer the world, and I have my doubts about that too. Launching apparatus into the heavens and maintaining it — the cost must be staggering. Who repairs a machine in orbit? Still, I will say this: if the dispatch is genuine, then the future belongs to the man who controls the network, not merely the device. That much I already know from my own wars over direct current distribution. Own the wire — or, it seems, the sky — and you own the customer. I shall go back to my filaments now. There is work to do in this century before I worry about the next.