Finally got around to watching the rest of the Satellites Do Not Exist video.
In the part I'd already watched before I posted it he was talking about how the temperatures in the thermosphere are equivalent to a blast furnace, and there's no way satellites could survive the heat.
I'd already figured out the solution to that while watching the video. The atmosphere at LEO is virtually nothing, it's a vacuum, so it'd have an incredibly low thermal conductivity. The rate of heat being absorbed from bumping into the occasional gas atom would be far less than the rate of heat being radiated away, so the satellites wouldn't heat up.
It turns out he wasn't ignorant of this explanation, about half way through the video he quotes some source which gives basically the same explanation, which also mentions that a regular thermostat would read a temperature far below zero.
But he completely fails to understand the explanation, and thinks it's a contradiction that the temperature of the gas at that altitude would be as hot as a blast furnace, and yet the effective temperature would be below zero because it's a vacuum.
He goes on for a bit demanding to know how, if that were true, it would be possible for us to feel the heat of the sun. He doesn't seem to understand the difference between heat transfer by direct contact and heat transfer by radiation.
What really blew my mind was his claim that rockets can't possibly work because there'd be nothing for the rockets to push against in space. Well, at least he understands that "
every action has an equal and opposite reaction", but apparently the concept of "reaction mass" is alien to him.
According to him, GPS is actually done by phone towers triangulating your position, and satellite dishes are a scam, and are actually picking up the same broadcast TV signals your regular antenna can pick up. Oh, and satellite phones are just regular phones with a bigger antenna, allowing them to connect to distant phone towers that are too far away for regular phones to reach.
He goes on for a bit about how the internet and phone communications are done by fibre-optic cable, not by satellites, as if that were somehow relevant. He doesn't seem to realize that a single strand of optical fibre would have a far greater bandwidth than an entire satellite, and that laying a cable containing hundreds of strands of optic fibre across long distances is a far more cost-effective way of transmitting vast quantities of information than by satellite.
He
has heard that satellites are visible to the naked eye, and he counters this by showing a brief video clip of the sky, and demands to know where the satellites are, saying that all he can see are stars and planets.
But I noticed that in the brief clip of the sky he shows, one of the "stars" is moving pretty fast relative to the other stars, and is almost certainly a satellite.
Not that he'd accept it as a satellite even if we pointed it out to him, because he also talks about how a satellite the size of a bus would be too small to see from a distance of over 90 miles away. He doesn't seem to realize that it'd also be shining brilliantly due to reflecting the light of the sun, and would look a lot like a star or a planet to the naked eye.
I think I'm going to need some time to rest and recover before I watch the one about the ISS being a hoax.
So... is he serious or just looking for attention ?
Oh, I'm pretty sure he's completely serious.
