• lordnikon@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    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?

      • BeardededSquidward@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        11 minutes ago

        What’s going to be performing convection to dissipate heat from the radiator in a manner to support the heat generated by an AI data center?

          • athatet@lemmy.zip
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            2 minutes ago

            What you don’t understand is the size requirements those radiators would need to have to cool an entire data center.

          • BeardededSquidward@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            4 minutes ago

            Tell me you don’t know how radiators actually work without telling me. They dissipate heat via convection through the air surrounding them or gasses in general. What does space lack a significant amount of?

    • credo@lemmy.world
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      1 hour ago

      Easy, just create a long heat sink and dangle it in the earth’s atmosphere. Now we are winning!

    • Jack_Burton@lemmy.ca
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      4 hours ago

      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.

    • EndOfLine@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      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.

    • Fermion@mander.xyz
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      3 hours ago

      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.

      • Devial@discuss.online
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        2 hours ago

        Have you seen the size of the radiators on the ISS ? And that’s just what’s needed for cooling of body heat for 9 people and basic computer and support equipment.

        A data center that is actively pumping out massive amounts of heat would need humongous radiator panels.

      • lordnikon@lemmy.world
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        3 hours ago

        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.

        • erin@piefed.blahaj.zone
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          15 minutes ago

          Geostationary satellites are not standing still. They’re orbiting the Earth at the same rate that it rotates “beneath” them.

        • nabladabla@sopuli.xyz
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          32 minutes ago

          Um, it doesn’t make the data center in orbit thing make sense, but a geostationary satellite absolute moves at high speed and does not stay in the same place in space.

        • teft@piefed.social
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          2 hours ago

          geostationary then its even harder as the the data center doesn’t move away from the heat.

          Geostationary would leave the satellite in shadow anytime it was night time over the part of the earth since a geostationary orbit is stationary in the sky over a given point at the equator.

          That doesn’t solve any of the cooling problems just saying that you do get some shadow at geostationary orbits.

          There are other orbits that get less shadow though.

        • Fermion@mander.xyz
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          2 hours ago

          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.