It’s such a hilariously dumb idea I hope the tech bros sink millions into it.
Lets make a data center we can’t maintain, upgrade or access for any practical reason. Waiting for the suggestions to put them in geostationary orbits so that way their latency is even higher but going to struggle staying powered when in Earth’s shadow. Or get put in the Earth-Sun L1 so they always have solar power but now have to have significant more radiators on top of even MORE latency beyond beyond the moon’s orbit.
I’d rather we just seize the wealth they have stolen from the working people of the world and use it for something we actually need. Like healthcare, or reducing carbon emissions.
But futurism bro science idiots see all space adventurism as equal. They see billionaires wasting resources on ideas hashed out with an LLM during a ketamine bender as just as worthwhile and scientifically valid as a probe to deep space or a rover to Mars.
I had a conversation with a colleague of mine about this. He believed that Musk’s decision to merge xAI and SpaceX was truly because of the potential of datacenters in space. I was unable to convince him that the logistics of this would be a nightmare and that this was just a way to make the Twitter buyout SpaceX’s problem.
It’s the Elon’s believe actually.
People that deal in computers think reality works like computers: just upgrade your drivers and download the reality you want.
Space Nuttery is a mental illness.
There recently was a report on Channel 4 about an American Bitcoin psycho gathering in Vegas where people framed the tech as unter interplanetary payment system. Someone explain them bandwidth please.
I skimmed the title for a sec and thought “what’s wrong with orbital stations?” before realizing the utter stupidity that graced my vision.
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Imagine launching that scale of infrastructure, loaded full of Nvidia chips that’ll be outdated in like 2 years.
Do we have a way to transfer heat into rock, because I’m thinking lunar data centers.
what is metal if not just concentrated bits of specific rock?
🤘
At medium earth orbit the minimum delay will be about 67ms (250 ms to 600+ ms for geostationary orbits) for LEO it is 25-50 ms. The average ground network ping on a good day is 1ms-20ms.
I think most of the internet will still be on Earth.
You wouldn’t be communicating to the data center?
If they build a data center on land and an identical one floating on the ocean, what is the difference in how much heat they emit when I throw thermite grenades at them?
Is this before or after we colonize mars?
After we discover FTL travel.
I’m far more concerned with the suggested floating datacenters. Just dumping more waste heat into the ocean. WCGW.
That space data center might end up dumping more waste into the oceans with all thise launches but certainly more into our atmosphere.
don’t need to think much about this crackpot idea.
where would the heat dissipate? that just ends this topic.
Via radiation into space. All you need is a radiator, the weight of a battleship (or worse). Yes, the idea is crazy.
Around or less than twice the size of the ISS radiator.
That gives you a heat rejection capacity of less than 140 kW (mind you, that is total heat rejection, incl. heat from the sun, support systems etc., only a part of that can be used to cool servers) So you settle for laughably low compute to keep radiator size somewhat reasonable, yet still massive and heavy.
The ISS is rated for 84kw but is run max at 70kw, probably for margin of error and whatnot since its for human saftey, which these will not be. They can also
probablyrun hotter, (edit reducing the size).The compute is 125kw avg per dish. 150 peak.
You do need margins not just for humans.
Building something the size of an (unmanned) space station for a single server rack, yes, it makes no sense. The energy needed to lift all that stuff into orbit, the comically inefficient cooling and never mind the issues of impact damage and radiation and inability to do any service (without huge effort) if things go wrong, all make this a pretty irrational idea.
Just put that server rack in Iceland with geothermal power and closed loop heat pump. But then the tech oligarchs would have to comply with laws and that is probably the reason they want it up in space. There surely is no technical reason for it.
Data / hardware sovereignty is a real thing, you can’t put all your data centers in another county, but building them in Texas vs Vermont/Alaska or elsewhere is stupid.
Seems to me that maintenance would be significant.
Maybe but also maybe they would hire my uncle and then he could go to space which would be pretty cool.
Argue? It’s a physics problem that has no solution.
