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They’re a great idea if you happen to own a company making AI, a company making rockets, and a company controlling public opinion.
S o l a r. F l a r e
That’s an insightful way of putting it, 10 points.
I envision a future so shitty that people are willing to physically destroy data centers in self-defense. Putting them in space is a really good way to combat that.
Putting them in space also puts them technically outside of the legal jurisdiction of any country. I figure fElon probably assumes that means said servers can never be subpoenaed.
I mean a data center barge or one in Antarctica would do much the same and be wildly cheaper and (relatively) more practical.
But those aren’t as “cool”
Putting data centers in space is a good way to keep people from destroying them. Thermodynamics on the other hand, will have a field day with them.
My question is always how the hell are you going to cool them. Do you know hard it is to move heat in a vacuum?
Have you never seen a movie set in space? Evrytime someone gets sucked into space they freeze. You saying every movie got it wrong?? Space is cold. Duh.
Please tell me you aren’t serious.
The problems; plural; is that the person who popularized the idea of data centers in space has little to zero understanding of any of the space sciences and yet owns and directs one of the world’s largest, and privately owned, aerospace companies with massive government contracts that splits its time with their own AI work.
With radiators just like with every existing satellite system.
https://youtu.be/DCto6UkBJoI&t=12m57s
Very large scale datacenters would likely have some nasty fluid handling problems to solve.
I’ll just note that I am not a fan of putting internet infrastructure in space. I think polluting the upper atmosphere with a bunch of metals every time a satellite deorbits will certainly have negative consequences. So IMO space should be limited to things we can’t do with earthbound infrastructure.
Yeah the amount of heat a data center vs a satellite your going to super heat the space in that orbit over time. It they are geostationary then its even harder as the the data center doesn’t move away from the heat.
Radiators in space work by radiating electromagnetic energy(light). Heat can only accumulate in matter, not in space, so that is definitely not one of the things we need to worry about.
I said so long ago. Flying masses of stuff into orbit, keeping it alive in a relative high radiation environment, cooling issues (there is no local river you can conveniently turn into steam), the list is long. Getting free power from large solar panels does not make up for it.
Getting free power from large solar panels does not make up for it
For the power required “large” is actually a gargantuan understatement. It would need to be larger than what would be easily seen from the planet surface.
Elon is a complete moron.
Plus when you build a datacenter on Earth you can use it for decades. You can swap out small parts (like the servers and networking hardware), which keeps it useful. Cooling and power setups are often good for a very long time and those can also be upgraded if needed. The building itself and all of the supporting infrastructure is good for at least 50 years. And a lot of the building is dedicated to easy access for humans to do stuff like maintenance. This is a design requirement for any datacenter.
When shooting shit into space, that’s it, you can’t access it for upgrades or maintenance. And we’ve seen these past years cutting edge AI hardware is good for maybe 3 years at best. After that it’s basically worthless, maybe useful for some niche uses, but mostly useless and definitely not profitable. Not that this matters much, as to keep latency down the orbits would be so low they deorbit within 3-5 years anyways, like with the current Starlink constellation.
But this is of course very useful for a cheap launch provider, as it keeps them yeeting shit into space non-stop. And what a surprise, Elon Musk is one of the people pushing this concept hard. No alternate motives there for sure.
but mostly useless and definitely not profitable
The main reason for this unprofitability is, quite frankly, energy costs. Wouldn’t be much of an issue in space where your energy is free.
The thing is spacex’s whole falcon 9 architecture needs something to do. They very quickly cleared the backlog of satellites waiting to launch and now they’re waiting for space start ups to materialize and want to launch things into space. The majority of falcon 9 launches now only launch starlink. It’ll get even worse if they can make starship work, they’ll have a huge capacity with nothing to put in it. Ai data centers in space are an attempt at justifying the entire concept of starship or at the very least employ the falcon 9 team.
This and spacex going public tell me the return on investment of a space based internet provider maybe isn’t profitable enough to fund a rocket development program. Their big cash cow, being the ISS taxi, is winding down and now they’re looking for suckers with money.
There was one study where they set the price of launching at 0 and it’s still a lot more expensive to use data centers in space.
For anyone who doesn’t know, this is because space is an absolutely terrible place to put computers. Getting power is actually the easiest problem to solve, and is still really hard, because building any kind of infrastructure in space is hard. Then you’ve got all that radiation you have to shield against because you’re no longer protected by the Earth’s atmosphere, and worst of all you’ve got the cooling problem because Jesus fucking Christ, space is not cold!
This is why I get annoyed every time a scifi movie shows people freezing to death in space. Because it leads to this level of mass delusion and then suddenly it matters and everyone just unquestioningly believes the lie that space is cold. Space is a vacuum. A vacuum is what your Contigo travel mug uses to keep your coffee scalding hot after four hours. If vacuums are that good at keeping something hot when it naturally wants to get colder, think about what they’ll do to something that is actively generating heat. All of your components are going to cook.
There are proposals to put data centres at the bottom of the ocean that are substantially more credible than this idiocy.
I’m always annoyed that people don’t get that space isn’t cold or hot, since heat is a property of matter, and that’s exactly what a vacuum doesn’t have. Your travel mug example is great. I’m going to start using it.
I don’t know if it would work but… Could an infrared laser expel enough heat?
You could cool them through radiative panels but you would need quite big panels to radiate away the heat a data center produces.
Maybe we should put datacenters on Mars, to warm it up.
I’d rather on the moon. It’ll melt all the cheese and there’ll be fondue lakes!
Whatever you do, don’t put it on Jupiter! It’ll get more stupider!
What if we put it on Uranus though?
deleted by creator
Was the title written by Trump?
A huge title, it’s great, one of the best titles we have ever seen. People come to me telling me: That’s the best title I have ever seen.
… with tears in their eyes and saying “thank you, Sir”
It’s referencing a book.
only way it will be worth putting anything in space is by having a spaceport in there first and some reliable way to haul stuff from ground to it. At least way i see it, at the moment its like building a complex facility on an undiscovered continent with no support. But anything we put there shouldnt be privately owned anyway, or maybe that can be acceptable AFTER we have good and reliable infrastructure there which can deal with the bullshit that comes with privately owned stuff.
Maybe, the destruction of earth is part of the calculations. If earth is gone, space might be an option.
Kinda feels like at this point it’s not “if”. It’s “when”.
i dont think anything in orbit or space is supportable without a planet. Or at least it would take so much effort and skill to pull it off.
Or maybe the rich want to have kind of ultimate ivory tower -> they live in luxury in orbital habitats while we slave on the surface for them. Maybe they would want to get somekind of coercion method too, like nuclear arsenal in orbit they could use to threaten any part of the surface that might get too rebellious. At least i can imaging enslaving the entire planet would be something those psychos dream of.
Well, its not that i think this is what they are planning right now, but it wouldnt put it past them.
Wasn’t that the script of Elysium?
No, this is fake news. I bet on Elon, he knows more than anybody on Earth, he already put men on Mars and created Hyperloop.
This is all part of the secret plot of a sentient AI that has taken over the US and wants to leave the planet asap /s
