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It doesn’t matter.
It’s a fantasy in billionaire’s heads, a self-perpetuating meme, and no one is telling them no. So they’re going to fund it, whether it makes any sense or not.
Reality doesn’t really matter anymore.
They’re a great idea if you happen to own a company making AI, a company making rockets, and a company controlling public opinion.
And an excellent way to scam a little. And fleece the flock
S o l a r. F l a r e
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.
Have to destroy the rockets that are used to maintain them then and just wait.
They aren’t maintained. They’re a constellation of small satellites in LEO like starlink that just go up and eventually come down.
If they’re too far up latency would be too high
No one is repairing any of these starlink type dishes.
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.
Subpoena the ground stations if that was true?
Oh yeah it’s totally a bullshit argument, it wouldn’t hold water in any court. Hell if nothing else, the ground stations like you said, or the country whose airspace the center exists over, would be in jurisdiction.
But I do believe that Musk believes it’s a get out of jail free card.
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.
That’s an insightful way of putting it, 10 points.
I was under the impressions cpu’s were very sensitive to radiation. If we could mine and manufacture in space I could see this maybe.
It’s not speculation. Nvidia themselves have run experiments with GPUs in orbit, and the issue gets worse with smaller lithography (eg newer chips).
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?
A radiator. Next question?
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?
What part of radiator don’t you understand?
What you don’t understand is the size requirements those radiators would need to have to cool an entire data center.
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?
Easy, just create a long heat sink and dangle it in the earth’s atmosphere. Now we are winning!
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.
They are completely cereal!
dude! how do you expect anyone to answer if you don’t say surely you can’t be?
Dude stop
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.
We already have data centers in space.
Oh? Good. Problem solved then.
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.
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.
They’re called fins. Not panels.
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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.
Geostationary satellites are not standing still. They’re orbiting the Earth at the same rate that it rotates “beneath” them.
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.
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.
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.
No such thing as a free lunch tho. It’s like saying solar energy on Earth is free, it’s obviously not. Sure, once the panels are produced and installed, the running costs are minimal. But that doesn’t mean that energy is now suddenly free. When I did the calculation on my solar installation, I took the costs of buying the panels, installing them, maintaining them and in the end tearing them down and properly recycling them. Then we calculated the estimated total energy produced during the lifetime of the system and thus arrived at a cost per unit of energy. Then we can compare that to what the cost would be as compared to other energy sources. At the time it didn’t make financial sense, as over the lifetime other energy sources (which might have been solar as well, just out of large scale installations) would be cheaper. But some government subsidies, plus a feeling the cost of energy in the future is unsure and wanting to contribute to sustainable energy production made me pay for them anyways.
It’s the exact same with launching a datacenter into space. Once it’s up there the energy might not cost anything and running costs per satellite might be relatively low (although there still are running costs for sure, often just spread out over the entire constellation), but that doesn’t mean the thing is free. Investers would want to see a return. So that means a lot of the costs are upfront, developing the system, paying the launch provider, getting the right licenses, etc, etc. Then during the lifetime of the system, it needs to sell the compute in order to make a profit. When directly competing with newer ground based systems that run cutting edge technology, it doesn’t really matter where or how the compute is done. It’s simply a unit of work being sold at market rate. Newer technology will push the price per unit down, as the new tech is more efficient. And it might make your compute less attractive as it’s lacking in newer capabilities, so it can only be sold at a lower price.
So even if the system would be designed for a lifespan of 10 years and put into an orbit that can last 10 years, the compute would be very hard to be sold for any reasonable price after 5 years. And as mentioned, operating a satellite is far from free, there are many running costs associated.
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.
If starship works (huge if) the markets it can open will be very different than the markets Falcon9 opened.
Something will need to develop around the new capabilities to use beyond their own use for starlink, but its going to be much easier for companies to come up with uses for it.
They make most of their money off starlink now, not ISS.
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.
Tell me if I’m wrong, but with the shielding they have on the ISS doesn’t it have issues that consumer grade computers they use last a few months due to various radiation and heat that they die? So an AI data center is going to be insane to protect long enough to make its components useful.
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.
That’s because science literacy is pretty low.
And to be fair, the average person doesn’t need to understand vacuum thermodynamics. The issues is when a few of those “average people” are now billionaires making unilateral decisions, surrounded by yes men and feeds instead of experts informing them of reality.
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?
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I don’t know if it would work but… Could an infrared laser expel enough heat?
You need to think about how an infrared laser works. You’re taking electricity, converting it into light and then focusing the light.
So you’d need to take the heat from your GPUs, inefficiently convert it into electricity (a lot of it would remain as heat), then inefficiently convert electricity into light (much of the electricity would turn back into heat in this process) and then focus the light away from the space data centre.
Now, we already have a process for moving heat away from things as infrared light, without going through all those steps (which would just reduce the efficiency of the process). It’s called a radiator, and it’s how we cool things in space. That’s literally where the name comes from; they radiate heat away as infrared light. That’s why hot things glow in thermal cameras.
It is incredibly inefficient. Radiation (ie, infrared light) is, by far, the worst way of cooling things. But in space its the only option you have, because there’s no convection or conduction across vacuum.
A top end GPU puts out about 1,000 watts of waste heat. The entire International Space Station has enough cooling for 14 of those, if it was doing nothing else whatsoever. An average server rack contains 72. The ISS cost $100 billion dollars. So at a minimum you’re looking at around $500 billion to put one single server rack in space. And that’s before accounting for the heat from the sun, which we can’t avoid because we need solar power to run this thing. So probably closer to a trillion. In other words, twice the already ludicrous price tag of Sam Altman’s “Stargate” project. For a single server rack.
You could cool them through radiative panels but you would need quite big panels to radiate away the heat a data center produces.
The entire ISS has 14GW of cooling (and a lot of that just goes towards keeping the sun from cooking it). A single server rack can produce around 72GW of heat.
The ISS cost about $100 billion.
Basically, if you took the entire budget of Sam Altman’s “Stargate” project (money that, to be clear, he does not have and will not get) and put it into space data centres you might, optimistically, put one rack in space.
Most data centres have dozens to hundreds.
You’re absolutely correct, but “quite big” might be the single biggest understatement I’ve seen in my life.
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.
Oh, thanks. I felt something is “unusual” about it.
Thanks!
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.
Not to mention that one time he saved all those trapped kids with his custom-built submarine.
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
