Imagine launching that scale of infrastructure, loaded full of Nvidia chips that’ll be outdated in like 2 years.
Argue? It’s a physics problem that has no solution.
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?
I skimmed the title for a sec and thought “what’s wrong with orbital stations?” before realizing the utter stupidity that graced my vision.
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?
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.
That is a huge amount of resources and money just to generate fake videos and porn.
At minimum how would the heat be managed? Also as someone else said, just getting the material from the earth into orbit is currently possible but why?
An average PC with 8GB of RAM will have around 4 bit-flips per year because of cosmic rays. When you remove the wonderful protective atmosphere that number is so greatly increased that they have to use older chips, encased in a shield for any computer system that is launched into space. Explain to me how you are supposed to have stability with 100 000 5nm process chips constantly be hit by cosmic rays? The answer is a shitload of lead or steel or concrete. It is fucking unrealistic to send that much shielding material into orbit. Option B is getting the equivalent compute with 50nm process space hardened chips into orbit, which is also unrealistic because of the shear amount of chips required to have a useful data center.
Anyone who immediately does not shut down the idea of orbital data centers should not be in the field of tech, and especially should not be the Csuite of a tech company. I can’t belive anyone even humors the idea, it’s a fucking joke.
A big radiator. Yes they know how to do it, they already do it at a smaller scale with starlink. No its not as big as people seem to think (but it is big). The solar panels are bigger at least 2-3x, maybe more.
Also the mass to orbit / size for this does not work without starship working.
Dumping heat is a real pain in space because you can’t use convection. Everything has to use big radiators and cool off radiatively. Then when it is exposed to the sun it will be hit by the full force of the sun’s heat, then when it is in the earth’s shadow it will rapidly cool.
They are in a sun synchronous orbit and the radiators will be positioned for the least contact while the solar panels will be the most.
Is this before or after we colonize mars?
After we discover FTL travel.
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?
They solve a couple issues but introduce a host of others.
If you focus on the couple issues solved, you’re obviously biased.
My favorite one was Musk gave.
So he said that the supply of a particular natural gas turbine part was constrained through 2030. Therefore, obviously, the simplest fix is to have thousands of starship launches with ISS-sized payloads and all the attendant crap.
Musk definitely has zero understanding of Kessler Syndrome; one of many drops in a bucket of evidence that he’s not the genius his PR team wants us to think he is.
At this point it’s also well documented that Musk essentially failed his way upward because of his family’s wealth.
Literally anyone with a normally functioning brain and the massive headstart Muskrat got could do everything he’s done and more, and probably much better.
Musk is a societal terrorist who is currently bent on destroying anything on his path to personal gain.
He should be erased, plain and simple. He could have been batman, but he chose to be a piece of garbage instead.
It’s kinda insane how far you can get in life with generational wealth.
No skill, all luck, eh?
You’d need self discipline to be Batman.
Not to mention physical courage.
I’m far more concerned with the suggested floating datacenters. Just dumping more waste heat into the ocean. WCGW.
If the floating data center is solar powered it wouldn’t actually add any heat that the patch of ocean covered wouldn’t already be getting.
You wildly underestimate the size of the oceans. If they’re going to be built anyway, and if they can have a long lifespan even in salt water, this would be far better for the environment than the currently popular method of using rivers for cooling - rivers can be warmed by perceptible and significant amounts until they carry that extra heat into the oceans, plus fresh water is more rare, precious, and in need of protection than salt water.
The heat from something like a datacenter will be far more localized and could damage the immediate area. I’m not saying they’ll magically warm the entire ocean any more than they would on land dumping waste heat into the atmosphere, but local temperature changes could have an effect.
I’m not in favor of megawatt data centers being used for mostly-bullshit AI in general, but as I said “if they’re going to be built anyway”, then they’ll do less harm in the ocean than most other places.
(That’s assuming they can avoid problems due to saltwater corrosion.)
If the heat made by the data centers can warm rivers, and those rivers can warm the oceans… Aren’t the data centers already warming the oceans? Which would mean that putting data centers directly in the ocean would definitely warm the oceans?
Temperature is what matters. The same amount of heat out into a river can significantly warm the whole river downstream, but have no detectable effect on the ocean temperature, just because the heat is diluted so much.
Like, dilute a bottle of tequila with two liters of cola, sure you’ll get drunk - but pour that same tequila into a full swimming pool, and you’d never get drunk even if you drink the pool water all day.
You understand rivers largely empty into oceans, right? Your tequila analogy leaves that part out. Eventually, you’re still dumping tequila (heat) into the pool (ocean).
The effects of heat are all due to temperature, which is reduced by dilution.
The alcohol molecules represent heat energy (Joules), and the ABV% represents temperature (Kelvin).
Rivers are small enough to be negatively affected by data center waste heat, but oceans really aren’t. They are being affected by the greenhouse effect though, because that is on a scale of petawatts, a million times the gigawatt scale of all global data centers together.
That space data center might end up dumping more waste into the oceans with all thise launches but certainly more into our atmosphere.
Why don’t you want to launch the equivalent of a data center in low earth orbit satellites just to have them rain back down every decade or so?
I think its a great idea. A bunch of these tech billionaires should go up on the SpaceGate Titan to survey their plots!
We could be launching solar panels into space that beam down radiation to make power more plentiful and cheap, but nah we but a complex data center that needs maintenance and complex parts
About half of solar energy passes through the atmosphere, that factor of two isn’t a good enough reason to use space-based solar panels for ground-based power grids.
Even though the microwave receiver power station in SimCity 2000 looked so cool.
But it’s still solar panel system that produces a lot of electricity in a small area regardless of efficiency
