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.
It would be 20kW for each rack or two. The types of data centre deal they talk about these days are measured in GW of compute. That's 50,000x just for 1GW.
To do that they'd have to be filled with something other than something water based to be able to do that over a large area which would require constant maintenance to do so. It's not easily feasible and I doubt people who want to do this or defend it realize that. I have to look it up but it takes Anhydrous Ammonia to perform that in the ISS. Like this is a bad idea and it fries my brain people trying to defend this.
Do you ever make posts that demonstrate what your opinions are or what your own thoughts are or do you just like to talk about other people and put them down cuz it makes you feel better?
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?
Yeah so there is some confusion here. The are radiators on cars or in houses, but those are more accurately heat exchangers. Then there are things like heat lamps, which are really IR radiators that convert electricity to infrared light that feels hot.
Most of the heat you feel at a camp fire is radiant from the flame, unless you are down wind and feeling some convective heat, but most of that heat goes straight up with the smoke.
Hard to say, but they’ve been using resistive radiative cooling In space a long time.
Also a tech ingredients made a neat video about building one and radiating heat out into space from the ground. It was cool to see what happened when it was cloudy and stopped working.
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.
And you can only build so many of those radiator panels before you start running into congestion problems. You don't want them radiating onto each other.
The area of radiator needed directly corresponds to the amount of power harvested by the solar panels. It doesn't matter what the load is. So a compute frame with the same amount of solar panels as the space station would need approximately the same radiatot area as the ISS, unless you are bringing nuclear power into the mix.
I agree that space based datacenters are a bad idea, but the thermals really are not the gotcha people are making them out to be.
The solar panels needed is another problem for the space data center fantasy. Once you put together all the mass over enough surface area to make it work, you would blot out the sun worldwide.
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.
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.
Thermal energy is primarily dissipated as infrared light which moves at the speed of light. There is no way for space to accumulate heat. If that were the case the entire solar system would be unlivable. The IR emitted by satellites is truly negligible in comparison to the electromagnetic radiation emitted by the sun.
Again, it doesn't help the case, but just.. no. The heat gets out of the spacecraft by radiating, and radiation doesn't move in a circular orbit around Earth, it moves at speed of light outwards from where it started.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wasn't it recently proven that the metals introduced into the upper atmosphere by satellites burning up depletes ozone? Its not a problem yet but maintaining constellations on the scale of cumulative several gigawatts of data centre would leave several tons of satellite burning up every single day. CFC Ozone hole is gonna look like a cloudy day in comparison.
Even if this ozone thing turns out to not be true, there are still all sorts of other things being burned up in the atmosphere that can have other potential effects. It all needs to be studied given the size of these constellations.
I wouldn't be surprised if 50-60 years from now, if there is a real issue, that it eventually comes out that SpaceX or other mega constellation companies figured out it would be a problem, and just said nothing. Much like how big oil new CO2 was a problem forever ago and hid it.
If they stop working they will just de-orbit it early, or if they can't cause it's really broken, they'll just wait the ~5-10 years to come down on it's own.
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.
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.
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.
seems the bottom of ocean equally stupid. in space you would have to deal with comsic/solar radiation damaging a satellite-type data center, and then you need solar cells/nuclear power, space debris is another problem.
a bottom of the ocean you would have to deal with the enormous pressures, even at several hundred feet down, corrosion, critters living or clogging up the 'buildings, silt.
Yes, the bottom of the ocean is a terrible place to put a data centre. And the fact that it is, somehow, still a more practical option than space is a really good indicator of how unbelievably stupid the entire notion of space data centres is.
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.
Hmm, this has me thinking about the stealth ships in The Expanse. The engineering needed to make it work makes me want to cry, but in principle you could run a Peltier cooler with a swappable heat sink.
To be clear, I don't think this is a viable option, but it's interesting to think about.
Basically the way you would make a stealth spaceship would be by focusing as much as possible on energy efficiency. At every juncture you would try to use as little power as possible, and use every bit of it as efficiently as possible, so that you're not remitting waste. That waste, in the form of heat, radio waves, etc, is what gets you spotted.
You could also run heatsinks temporarily for enhanced stealth as you suggest, then open up radiators to cool them - or eject them - once it's safe to do so.
(For the Elite: Dangerous players, yes, that game got it right.)
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.
Project Icarus it was called, the fourth space program of that name and the first for which it was appropriate. Long before Jacob's parents were born—before the Overturn and the Covenant, before the Power Satellite League, before even the full flower of the old Bureaucracy—old grandfather NASA decided that it would be interesting to drop expendable probes into the Sun to see what happened.
They discovered that the probes did a quaint thing when they got close. They burned up.
In America's "Indian Summer" nothing was thought impossible. Americans were building cities in space—a more durable probe couldn't be much of a challenge!
Shells were made, with materials that could take unheard of stress and whose surfaces reflected almost anything. Magnetic fields guided the diffuse but tremendously hot plasmas of corona and chromosphere around and away from those hulls. Powerful communications lasers pierced the solar atmosphere with two-way streams of commands and data.
Still, the robot ships burned. However good the mirrors and insulation, however evenly the superconductors distributed heat, the laws of thermodynamics still held. heat will pass from a higher temperature to a zone where the temperature is lower, sooner or later.
The solar physicists might have gone on resignedly burning up probes in exchange for fleeting bursts of information had Tina Merchant not offered another way. "Why don't you refrigerate?" she asked. "You have all the power you want. You can run refrigerators to push heat from one part of the probe to another."
Her colleagues answered that, with superconductors, equalizing heat throughout was no problem.
"Who said anything about equalizing?" the Belle of Cambridge replied. "You should take all excess heat from the part of the ship were the instruments are and pump it into another part where the instruments aren't."
"And that part will burn up!" one colleague said. "Yes, but we can make a chain of these 'heat dumps,'" said another engineer, slightly more bright. "And then we can drop them off, one by one ..."
"No, no you don't quite understand." The triple Nobel Laureate strode to the chalkboard and drew a circle, then another circle within.
'Here!" She pointed to the inner circle. "You pump your heat into here until it is, for a short time, hotter than the ambient plasma outside of the ship. Then, before it can do harm there, you dump it out into the chromosphere."
"And how," asked a renowned physicist, "do you expect to do that?"
Tina Merchant had smiled as if she could almost see the Astronautics Prize held out to her. "Why I'm surprised at all of you!" she said. "You have onboard a communications laser with a brightness temperature of millions of degrees! Use it!"
Enter the age of the Solar Bathysphere. Floating in part by buoyancy and also by balancing atop the thrust of their refrigerator lasers, probes lingered for days, weeks, monitoring the subtle variations at the Sun, that wrought weather on the Earth.
I don't think the point is to really build datacenters in space. The point is to convince investors that it can be done in a profitable manner so some people can create a fake businesses out of it and siphon money off the system. Much like the same as trying to convince investors that LLM + more money = AGI
It's a legal thing. No (real) jurisdiction. In space nobody will shut down Grok generating kiddo porn. It's basically the precursor for Epstein Island 2.0.
I also wonder if this is an entire red herring. There are increasing reasons for more compute in space, such as to pre-filter sensor data.
Is it to naive/optimistic to think no one is actually looking for a space datacenter to compute terrestrial loads, but they recognize the need for processing space loads?
Yes, and it's easier to cool things on earth. In space, there's no air to help you cool thinks off, you can only reject heat through radiation. Most spacecraft are carefully designed to reflect heat/light on surfaces facing the sun and radiate heat into empty space from surfaces that are shaded.
Yes I'd like to build data centres on Uranus one of the most distant planets in our solar system, and also one without a solid surface but who's counting.
There's also the issue that around once a year the two planets will be on opposite sides of the sun. Not only would you have a lag of close to 3 hours, but communication would be completely impossible for a month or so at a time.
It would need to have an atmosphere, so asteroids and most (all? Idk not an astronomer) moons are out.
Mars might be feasible at some point in the far future, but there's still the lag problem of 3-20 minutes depending on time of year, so not very useful for anything user facing.
Pretty much every moon but Titan. Titan, however, would be excellent for heat dissipation. Long before generative AI was even a thing, scientists have speculated that Titan would be the perfect place for datacenters because low-temperature computation is so much more efficient.
Of course, building a datacenter on Titan would be a several-hundred-trillion dollar endeavor, so... good luck bootstrapping your way into that industry.
None of the moons in our solar system have atmospheres. Earths moon is too small to hold on to an atmosphere, and the Galilean moons of Jupiter are too cold for an atmosphere, the gases just freeze.
The best place would be either a space station in low earth orbit or of the L4 or L5 point. The data issue would be the problem though I suppose you could just use the data centres for training but not for active processing but then you would need to build data centres on earth for that.
Given that you're going to build the earth data centres anyway you might as well do all of the processing on earth at the same time.
There's another problem that nobody mentions. Putting thousands of additional satellites into space would seriously increase the risk of Kessler Syndrome occurring.
Collisions in LEO can chuck debris into orbits which intersect higher orbits. If one of those collides with something in in said higher orbits, you have a problem.
It's possible it could go to a higher orbit, but we don't have mega constellations in those orbits. I don't know enough to know how far something could get flung up either, but I suspect if you're in a 5y orbit, you aren't reaching a 50y orbit area, and probably not even a 10y orbit area.
Any orbit resulting from a collision will pass through that collision point unless there's another collision to change it's velocity again. The higher a collision sends an object, the more likely the "orbit" intersects with more atmosphere to cause drag, or it might even collide with the ground without drag.
I sincerely doubt that a collision in low earth orbit is going to result in debris being flicked up into geostationary orbits, the energy differences involved are just monumental.
Little bit of a nitpick but Kessler syndrome doesn't care about how many satellites you have, and more about how many dead satellites you have hanging around on random orbits. You could put hundreds of millions of satellites in space as long as you had some sort of decommissioned program. You can always send up rockets if you can just move the satellites out of the way / know where they are.
Dead satellites do add a much larger risk than satellites that can be steered, sure. If we stopped steering all our satellites right now, I believe it'd only take a few days before a collision occurred.
However, every satellite in orbit adds to the risk, especially if a chain reaction starts happening and it becomes very hard to avoid the shrapnel flying around. Or if a once-in-a-century-type solar flare takes out a bunch of satellites.
Edit: Basically, the best way to prevent Kessler Syndrome from occurring, is to keep the number of satellites in orbit below the threshold where it could occur.
The idea of putting data centers in low Earth orbit sounds cool at first. It feels futuristic. It feels like something that should be efficient.
It is not.
Yes, space is cold. Yes, you get a lot of solar power. Those are the two points everyone repeats. What they leave out is basic physics and cost.
Cooling in space is not free. There is no convection. Heat only leaves through radiation. That means giant radiator panels. AI racks throw off massive heat loads. The more compute you add, the more radiator surface area you need. That adds mass. Mass costs money to launch.
Even with companies like SpaceX driving launch prices down, it is still extremely expensive per kilogram. And servers are not permanent infrastructure. They get replaced every three to five years. You cannot economically upgrade racks in orbit the way you do in a building on Earth.
Then you have radiation. Either you harden the electronics, which makes them slower and more expensive, or you accept higher failure rates and build in heavy redundancy. Maintenance becomes a logistical nightmare. A failed power supply on Earth is a service call. In orbit it is a robotics problem.
Meanwhile hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google put data centers next to cheap power, fiber backbones, and cold climates. It is boring. It is practical. It works.
Orbital data centers only make sense if we already have large scale industry in space. We do not.
And what really makes these threads irritating is the obvious rage bait framing. Throw up a clickbait title about AI destroying the planet or Big Tech trying to escape Earth and you attract people who already hate AI. The discussion stops being about engineering and economics and turns into ideological noise.
If someone wants to seriously debate energy efficiency or scaling limits, fine. But pretending near Earth orbit is some obvious solution is not serious analysis.
It is a cool sci fi concept. It is not a rational infrastructure strategy.
To add to your point about logistical nightmare, Microsoft tried an underwater datacenter. Even right there, just a little bit underwater was absolutely not worth it.
Really? I would have figured the Rapture route would be workable with the right engineering. Especially given the massive amounts of borderline free cooling and non-existing regulatory environment if outside territorial waters.
Servers get replaced that often because they are using too much energy for too little computing power compared to newer generations. If the module is already up there and functioning and energy is free then it's a whole different thing.
Defects are another topic.
And the whole thing is obviously crazy for a whole lot of other reasons.
Of course they are, same with undersea data centers (for different reasons).
But it doesn't matter. In the late-stage capitalism we find ourselves in, you don't need a real product, nor a promising prototype. You don't even need a good idea, you just need the promise that you'll come up with a good idea soon. That's enough to get the investors drooling, the shareholders hyped, and the gullible idiots engaged.
And you only have to maintain that long enough to pay yourself and your insiders some fat checks. Then when inevitably, reality barges in and people start to realize it was all bullshit and pipe dreams, you've already cashed out. If your PR team is good, the media and your sycophantic fans will praise you as a visionary who was simply, "ahead of their time." And you can go on to rip off more people.
It's basically Patreon scams but with billions of dollars.
Late stage capitalism just means late stage fiat currency doesn't it, since all the money flooding in is debt and QE, and every dollar created and placed into the market is new cheap debt issuance?
Then we bail all the bad debt out when it fails, so the perverse incentive to issue bad debt is always there, because its not capitalist and nobody would backstop this mess if it was their own capital.
You can have late stage capitalism with any monetary system. Though relying on inherent value tends to leave poor people in much worse conditions much more quickly.
If anything it seems more like crony capitalism, when the CPI is understated and all investments are excluded it drives down borrowing rates and bond yields, which raises stock values and provides a stream of revenue to those with access to the most credit.
People like Elon Musk who avoid paying taxes by borrowing cheap debt, which who would lend to him their own capital when his collateral is Tesla stock and silly ideas like space datacenters. Which is entirely built on speculation and pumps to new all time highs whenever QE is unloaded into the market; they would be taking the risk that Tesla doesnt go to 0 for a small fixed income payout, if it was their own money and a bailout wasnt guaranteed.
Everything you described falls under the umbrella of Capitalism.
Capitalism will always result in this sort of devolution, because it rewards this sort of behavior.
Constant GDP growth fuels capitalist enterprises because valuations go up and Capital is expanded. That incentivizes governments to make access to Capital easier and regulations on growth looser, which the firms themselves favor in terms of lower taxes, cheaper loans, larger capital markets, etc.
How many business leaders lobby, vote, and push for higher general taxes, stronger labor rights, stricter regulations, and more expensive loans?
The only time you'll see them doing any of those things, is when it directly hurts one of their major competitors.
This makes perfect sense within a Capitalist framework, because private ownership of the means of production and increasing profitability are literally the core of Capitalism. So of course Capitalists will always tend towards what makes the most money.
All the worst traits of modern Capitalism, (Everything is a subscription, planned obsolescence, shrinkflation, extreme litigiousness over patents and copyrights, ads in everything, predatory pricing & monetization) are the logical result of a Capitalist system.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thats not a naive question at all. You’re totally right. The term to learn about this is “rad-hardened computing”. It’s a solved problem, but the solution involves a buttload of redundancy and extra silicon with huge performance reductions compared to non-hardened tech.
It’s less of an issue if you’re in the shadow of the sun but still quite a big issue.
So they would need to swallow up even more of our chip fab production and push ram and SSD prices even further through the roof for checks notes ah yes... the same functionality as they have on earth.
AI is already unprofitable because of the insane hardware requirements and the fact that no company has a "moat" so there is a race to the bottom pricing-wise... I can't imagine anyone also then accounting for building space-hardened kit and getting it into space and dealing with shortened lifespan of the kit is ever gonna see a return.
All this just so that a chatbot can confidently tell people the wrong stuff
Yes but also no. Bit flips will happen unless you have rad-hardened computers but apparently, bit-flips are not really too problematic for LLM training. I guess when correct answers are optional, correct buts are as well.
Not trying to be an asshole, just giving info: the radiation shielding on earth is achieved (mostly?) by the magnetic field that diverts the big particle cannon ammunition.
I love how his rationale is that manufacturers of natural gas generator parts are backordered o 2030, so instead of... I don't know, spinning up more natural gas hardware or terrestial power generation, the easiest solution is to go from 11 attempts/0 successful launches of a space platform to tens of thousands of launches a year carrying unprecedented mass of bullshit into orbit...
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.
Well, that’s just it. Facebook makes so much money their Metaverse failure doesn’t even matter, they can just write it off and Zuckerberg faces zero consequences.
This is the same. These guys could burn many billions on space data centers, get zero returns, yet face zero consequences, essentially leaving the rest of the world with the bill/wasted work.
The thing that people miss in this is that the feature they're seeking by putting servers in space is only to have servers outside of any jurisdiction, with the advantages that it might bring
This is 1 million% what's at play here. Tech bros HATE that they have to deal with stupid laws, and putting a server outside of the jurisdiction of literally every country is a dream. A giant server ship has to dock, it needs fuel....not so with something in orbit (in Elon fantasy land anyway)
Before even considering radiation damage, hopium $200/kg launch costs mean 15c/kwh electricity. The you add the cost of specialized panels and radiation emitters. At least 20x that of earthly systems.
BEAT CHINA to space is for sure the magic words, but even better, what I told you to come up with an excuse to merge my space company with my AI company, and even though it is a paper transaction with no money changing hands, increase my wealth by $300B for the price I set!
The real issue with space-based data centers isn't just whether they’re a "bad idea" from an engineering perspective; it’s that they represent the ultimate transition toward a vertically integrated, unregulated monopoly. While everyone is focused on the technical hurdles, we need to look at who actually benefits from this shift. For someone like Elon Musk, this isn't just a project—it's a way to own the entire global internet stack. Because he owns the "truck" (SpaceX) and the "road" (Starlink), he can launch and link these data centers essentially for free. This creates a market that is so tightly locked into one ecosystem that it can never be challenged by a terrestrial competitor.
From a purely operational standpoint, space turns every earthly liability into a superpower. Data centers on the ground are a nightmare of land taxes, massive water consumption for cooling, and constant strain on local power grids. In orbit, those costs vanish. Heat is radiated into the vacuum for free, and solar power is available 24/7 without weather or night cycles getting in the way. Even the physical security is inherently top-notch because the hardware is literally unreachable. When you combine that with a mesh network like Starlink, the need for laying fiber lines disappears entirely. The user just needs an antenna, and the "gatekeeper" handles everything else in the sky.
The terrifying downside is that this creates a jurisdictional black hole. If a server is orbiting 500km above the Earth, whose laws actually apply to the data stored on it? We’re talking about a "gated community" where the ownership, pricing, surveillance policies, and privacy standards are all controlled by a single entity with zero competition or government oversight.
Once we stop building ground infrastructure and rely solely on the "space cloud," we lose all leverage. It’s an engineering miracle for the person who owns it, but it’s a democratic nightmare for the rest of us. It’s not just a bad idea; it’s the construction of a digital kingdom that sits physically and legally beyond our reach.
Granted I never made it further than freshman level physics in college but doesn’t heat needs a media to radiate away. Otherwise it just stays in place? So there would be nothing to move the heat away from installation? The ISS uses these big radiators the emit the waste heat as infrared light. That seems like a plausible method to exhaust waste heat. But I don’t have any clue if that can scale up to the level of a huge data center compared to the systems on the ISS
Heat is energy as "vibration of molecules". It spreads to adjacent molecules by conduction, unless we have other interesting things going on. Easy stuff.
Vacuum is the absence of molecules to conduct heat to.
Yes, ISS radiates heat to space. The total ISS power burden and by extension heat dissipation need is less than a lot of these GPU racks. They need big radiators just for that. Imagine ISS sized radiators per rack of equipment, how for apart the equipment would have to be, how much more mass cost for launch that is, etc etc...
When you combine that with a mesh network like Starlink, the need for laying fiber lines disappears entirely
Citation needed.
And on water usage, I will point out that gas generators and evaporative cooling are only used on Earth because other methods (geothermal, big radiators, heatpumps) are somewhat more expensive... Not, like, orders of magnitude more expensive like pure radiative cooling in space.
We already radiate heat away just fine in space, it's just a matter of how much space do you need to use to do it and all the implications of what that would mean for any given satellite. I wouldn't call it free, because you need the hardware to do it and the extra weight reduces the payload capacity of whatever you're sending up, but we can do it.
Starlink also uses laser links to talk to each other which these satellites would also use. How they work can depend, but generally they bounce around in space until they can't, and they might come back down to land, to move somewhere else over fiber to another ground station until they can go back up to reach you. But the more laser links the less they have to come down for technical reason, but they might still come down for bandwidth reason. I don't really know how likely it is that any given connection is point to point.
Example of what could happen.
Your dish -> starlink -> starlink -> ground station -> Google -> ground station -> starlink -> ground station -> starlink -> groundstation -> starlink -> starlink -> your dish.
Fiber is still the better option on land if you can get it there, but there are a lot of places it's never going to get laid, and will never be in the air, or on bodies of water.
Edit: Corrections on the laser links with an example.
I get a circular radiator at least a kilometer wide, assuming the radiator is quite efficient, a rather modest datacenter, and very hot coolant (70C).
…Realistically, the coolant temperature would need to be much lower. See how it’s a power of four in the formula? That means the radiator area gets very large real quick.
I cannot emphasize how expensive a functional 1km+ radiator would be in space. It’s mind bogglingly expensive.
If a space datacenter is in LEO like Starlink, then it’s in Earth's shadow a lot of the time, and would have to be “part” of the starlink network constantly zooming over the ground. If it’s geosynchronous, then laser communication (or any communication) gets real tricky, and latency is limited by the speed of light. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but reliable high data rates would be an expensive engineering challenge.
For 100kW? I'm not going to try and figure things out from that massive site. A pre made calculator would have been nice if they had one.
edit: It is going to be LEO and likely connected to starlink with the same laser link they use.
Edit: Looking at orbits they might use sun synchronous orbits? It might not be in sun 100% of the time, but they are nearly always in sun.
Edit: I have no way to know if this is right, but a couple AI responses are saying for 100kW it would be ~150-170 square meters with temperatures around 70c
100kW? Nvidia BGX 200 servers are 14kW each, not counting the interconnect, or anything else. According to nuggets I’ve read online, we’re talking 200 megawatts for an Earth-based AI datacenter these days, without something exotic like underclocked Cerebras WSEs (which would be pretty neat, actually…)
I get about 0.46 square kilometers, depending on the coolant temperature, and ultimate efficiency of the system (with how you orient the thing relative to solar panels, how you circulate coolant…)
I have no clue what the construction of such a huge structure would look like, but if it was a simple 0.5 inch aluminum sheet, it would weigh like 15,000 metric tons. Even much thinner, that’s still on the order of “mass of a cargo ship”
Why is that, though?
Well, something like the ISS doesn’t generate much heat, and hypothetical rockets that need big radiators have very hot coolant to dissipate heat quickly. But space data centers are the sinister combination of “tons of waste heat” and “needs a low coolant temperature.”
They aren't making a datacenter like on earth. They're putting up a ton of satellites that will each generate about 100kW.
Everyone keeps thinking they're putting these massive things up there, they are not doing that.
Edit: Oh I missed your tool this time was a real calculator this time, thank you! That says 127 square meters, with black body, 70c and 1 (but no idea if those are good values)
That’s interesting, but what’s the point? If it’s like 2 DGX boxes in each satellite, spaced out, the interconnect between them is going to be very slow, and the individual computational power of each satellite will not be that impressive.
And if you connect them all in one constructed mesh and wire them together, well, you’ve made a 200MW datacenter! The economies remain the same.
If hardware gets more power efficient, well… Then why do you need to go to space anymore?
Pardon my potential ignorance, but I'm under the assumption that radiating heat in vacuum is NOT easy. Normally, heat escapes from sources into the surrounding atmosphere, whereas in space, only radiant heat (IR?) can bleed off into vacuum. The conductive heat from, say, a cycling loop of water still needs a radiator that vents into surrounding volume. Without atmosphere, radiators can't conduct efficiently, right?
Your thoughts were really well written. I'm glad you took the time to explain your viewpoints organically instead of taking an easy way out to avoid having to do it yourself.
How about this for what my post was trying to say....
It's a good idea to the person who can pull it off. It will be highly profitable and they will monopolize that ecosystem. For the rest of us, if this were ever to become adopted wide spread, it has the potential to make something that normal people can no longer compete with and can't easily avoid (assuming it is significantly subsidized initially to offset cost and get users to adopt it)
I'm no expert, but I feel like a data center in space is a super niche use case. Bandwidth seems like it would be a major issue. Heat seems like it would as well. And as you said, jurisdiction would be a problem that many businesses wouldn't necessarily want to contend with.
While the devices are difficult to get to physically, should an adversarial state actor send something up, it's not like we could stop them from accessing the devices in a way we could if they were within the borders of a country. They're harder to reach for smaller adversaries, and significantly easier for bigger ones. Not to mention significantly harder for us to repair if something goes wrong.
I'm not saying data centers in space are a bad idea in general, but I am not seeing a huge benefit to them right now.
Considering the ludicrous price to put each pound of equipment into orbit, I'd like to invite them to send as much hardware as they can in to (high) geostationary orbit so they can find out how well a vacuum does NOT promote radiating heat
Edit: also forgot about solar radiation flipping bits. I love the idea of them having to reboot the machine (if they even can) remotely once ever 15 minutes
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.
As someone who designs and builds networks as a profession, I don't see this being a great idea. Maybe I just don't have all the facts.
I am leaning heavily on the example of M$ trying an underwater datacenter, which they decommissioned and have not pursued further. Put a node of compute somewhere and eventually it will become obsolete or unusable due to hardware failure. Not to mention the energy requirements and cooling needed in space. Waste heat does not just dissipate unless it has a heat sink, which adds more volume and mass to the payload!
Turns out you can't cool something just by putting it in space because most heat transfers require convection, which requires a medium, say, air.... which is notably lacking in space.
Yeah, heat dissipation is surprisingly difficult in space, because the only real way to do it is via radiation. And radiation is one of the least effective methods of dissipating heat.
The vast majority of heat transfer on earth happens via physical contact, in the form of fluids or solids touching each other. That’s what a heat sink is for. It increases surface area, so more fluid (air) can touch it and carry heat away. But without some sort of fluid contact, a heat sink isn’t going to help much. It’ll act as a radiator, but the cooling efficiency will only be a fraction of what is achieved via traditional forced air cooling.
I can see the point of underwater datacenters though, for some very specific use cases. Compute heavy workloads with high energy densities could possibly make sense to ”free cool” below water. DLC everything and pump the heat straight into the ocean.
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.
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.
it was? havent watched it.
I really hope it wont ever come to that, but knowing what those monsters do to kids it wouldnt surprise me if they wanted to make that movie into reality.
I feel like on part no one ever mentions on things like this are, how do you enforce any jurisdiction on a satellite and what it's doing.
The main crazy thing about a satellite data enter is you can't confiscate it and therefore you can't control it. Hell once it's up there the only thing any government might be able to do is find the owner and force them to crash it (if possible).
It in a sense sounds a bit like the wild west of the original internet. Admittedly Musk being at the forefront of it all sounds terrible, but I think there is something fascinating about an information hub that could be completely independent of any country.
Yeah, that was my point. Like all technology it has potential to liberate communications, but also enable bad actors. However, to me, it's the biggest reason why this technology would matter at all.
Disabling/destroying a satellite has only been shown to be feasible by a handful of militaries in the world in very controlled situations.
Unless you mean you disable it via commands to the satellite, but that assumes there is a way to disable it and that you know who can disable it and can force them to do so.
So assuming a water cooloant system, the water is heated and then the question how efficiently can you use this to generate energy? Even the simplest scenerio of pumping this water to a place where hot water is needed and would normally be produced by heating it with gas or elecetricity is a means of producing energy. Wouldn't probably work here though as the water coolant system is a closed loop so you can't have water leave the system. It still could pass through another reservoir of water to heat it up which then could be used for other purposes. But don't know about specifics enough to guess whether or not this is feasible.
Interestingly NASA had an idea of a plan that sounds at least technically possible, but it's a multi-decade operation and doesn't look anything like what the current startups are pitching. Of course you can have your data centers in space, why the fuck not, but a data center sits on top of a lot of boring old infrastructure which nobody's excited to talk about.
It's going to be prohibitive if you have to pay the gravity tax every time you want to move 1 ton of metal, so realistically this kind of high-tech project cannot even begin without having substantially industrialized the moon. Nothing fancy but you'll need at least some mining and refining, and solid trans-lunar logistics routes. Probably some housing for a bit of personnel too. At that point the space data center would be dwarfed by the size of its own support system.
I mean, making fuel is one thing. A future where we can manufacture electronics and spaceflight tech off Earth is far, far away. Like so far a lot of other technologies are going to scramble the economics anyway.
Actually i was more thinking of crude metallurgy and materials processing. You could quite easily get aluminium from lunar regolith, and also tons of silicates. This allows you to produce shielding, radiators and the structural elements of solar panels without having to kaboom-boom the tons of raw material from the Earth. And it's not particularly high-tech stuff either, just some furnaces and basic extruding would go a long way. If you just have to ship the delicate electronics from Earth you're already saving a lot.
There’s nowhere to dump heat! Modern data centers rely on heat exchange systems that move excess waste energy into the air or earth. The servers will be thermally throttled to a crawl.
Sure you can have fancy liquid cooling to move heat away from the processors, but you still need something to move the heat into. You can radiate it into space, but not quickly enough to do useful work 24/7.
No, that works well with Starlink for example. But only because it's in low earth orbit. In geostationary orbit You do in fact have a horrible ping.
Not being familiar with the details of this Elon brain fart I would hope they didn't aim for geostationary... Because why?? Then again who knows with that idiot.
If it's close enough for respectable latency, it's close enough to experience drag. Given the maddeningly high power/cooling and resultant large surface area, then that satellite will have a tendency to incur re-entry.
So either close enough for "ok" latency but will burn up relatively soon or high enough to keep an orbit longer but terrible latency.
Hmm. Assuming you have some small hydrazine or whatever booster you could maintain a low orbit for a while. But yes not endlessly. That bring said there is a middle ground between 400km and 34000km that might provide for a good orbit and acceptable ping. That all depends on the application of course.
They already run AMD chips on starlink, so they've figured out someway to shield them in most cases. Some solar flares at bad times (something about while raising orbits) has nuked some dishes before.
Its probably cheaper to account for some expected losses, than shield them perfectly.
Im pretty sure they are shielded as I think I have seen stuff like that for the electronics in the iss. Thing is that the eletronics in sattelites and the space station are pretty small relative to datacenters. The only benefit I can really see is maybe they can be solar powered which I guess if the panel acts as shielding and stays sun facing but all the extra expense of getting it up there. I just don't see it as practical. I mean technically it should either work or not basedo on cost as long as they don't wring out any subudies or soemthing.
I think everyone is really confusing what these datacenters are.
They aren't these massive things. They're going to be a little bigger than v3 starlinks all working together in some manner. The best estiamte we have on size is v3 is 20kW of power, and these will be ~100kW
Edit: also power doesnt necessarily mean size. The GPUs will put off more heat per size i bet than whatever is in starlink, and even if it 5x'd the size of the computing area of the dish compared to starlink, that's still tiny. It's the radiator that will take up the space, not the datacenter portion.
They are and they aren't. Radiation causes problems in terms of Single Event Upsets where a 0 turns to 1 and a 1 turns to 0 for a super tiny second. CPUs take some amount of time to let the transistor circuit stabilize before moving onto the next instruction so if an SEU happens in the beginning of this period it won't have any downstream effects. Like a bump on the road.
Memory however is vulnerable to this tiny amount of time and can flip a bit to a different state than it's supposed to be, but both are solvable problems with hardware and software based solutions, with ECC being the most common.
The other major problem is Total Ionizing Dose. Put silicon based semiconductors in radiation long enough and they will break down, and there's no real hardware or software based solution to that. But it takes a long time
That is what I remember but it sounded like its a problem like that on earth with the massive atmosphere shielding and is exponentially worse in space.
Making reusable rockets is impossible and stupid. Electric cars are stupid and wont work. Satellite internet is too expensive and stupid. So far Elmo is batting 3 for 3 and I am going to bet he can make it work. Unlike the CyberTruck
none of these things "have worked" they just represent a privately subsidized shift in infrastructure and society. there is no such thing as progress, you progressive
I am biased because I have starklink and love it. It works...but before Elon worked on his vision for re usable rockets it was a dream.
He changed the world.
More nuanced (and without using the word "stupid")
Making reusable rockets is very difficult. It was high risk, high reward.
Electric cars were always the climate change solution IF the battery gets good enough. And it got good enough. I hate my country's car industry (I'm from Germany) for not getting their asses up.
Satellite internet is in fact too expensive for average customers. I think, no on has ever declared it as bad for people in regions without existing internet intrastructure. The question is how profitable it is, but it's not publicly traded, so we will probably not get the numbers.
For sure, Elmo can somehow make profit out of it, e.g. by selling the space cloud usage as "can't be controlled by an government on earth" for a high price. But when we concentrate on the facts: It can't be more efficient than Azure or AWS on earth, at least not for the next decades.
285 Comments
lordnikon@lemmy.world · 112 pts · 166d
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?
EndOfLine@lemmy.world · 90 pts · 166d
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.
fallaciousBasis@lemmy.world · -17 pts · 166d
We already have data centers in space.
athatet@lemmy.zip · 23 pts · 166d
Oh? Good. Problem solved then.
Akasazh@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 166d
User name checks out, though
Jack_Burton@lemmy.ca · 36 pts · 166d
SaltySalamander@fedia.io · 1 pts · 166d
Please tell me you aren't serious.
snooggums@piefed.world · 31 pts · 166d
They are completely cereal!
ferrule@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 166d
Super cereal
StaticFalconar@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 166d
With extra milk
HubertManne@piefed.social · 9 pts · 166d
dude! how do you expect anyone to answer if you don't say surely you can't be?
mech@feddit.org · 9 pts · 166d
I am serious, and don't call me dude!
ripcord@lemmy.world · -3 pts · 166d
Dude stop
credo@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 166d
Easy, just create a long heat sink and dangle it in the earth’s atmosphere. Now we are winning!
0x0@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 166d
From that to a space elevator...
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 166d
Raditors. Starlink v3 can in theory already shed (edit 20) kW of heat. But they would need to figure out how to 5x that and keep things profitable.
wewbull@feddit.uk · 5 pts · 166d
It would be 20kW for each rack or two. The types of data centre deal they talk about these days are measured in GW of compute. That's 50,000x just for 1GW.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 166d
These aren't big things, they're small satellites. They're going to be ~100kW. They only need to 5x the existing radiator they think will work.
fallaciousBasis@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 165d
How would you power them?
The surface area of solar panels exceeds the surface area needed for radiators to cool everything.
In space I would imagine you'd find the perfect sandwich ratio. One bun solar, one bun radiators, the meat being the racks.
fallaciousBasis@lemmy.world · -1 pts · 166d
A radiator. Next question?
BeardededSquidward@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 14 pts · 166d
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?
Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 5 pts · 166d
Obnoxious as he seems to be, he's actually right, there will be no convection, but they'd radiate heat in a vacuum, by IR IIRC.
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 166d
You'd need an enormous radiator to move the heat a data center puts out. Not even all the billionaires put together could afford that.
Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 5 pts · 166d
Sure, the idea is as bad as solar roadways. It's actually kind of impressive to come up with an idea that bad.
BeardededSquidward@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 166d
To do that they'd have to be filled with something other than something water based to be able to do that over a large area which would require constant maintenance to do so. It's not easily feasible and I doubt people who want to do this or defend it realize that. I have to look it up but it takes Anhydrous Ammonia to perform that in the ISS. Like this is a bad idea and it fries my brain people trying to defend this.
Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 166d
Yeah as I have already said, it's kind of impressive how bad the idea is, I mean how can it be worse...
fallaciousBasis@lemmy.world · -8 pts · 166d
What part of radiator don't you understand?
athatet@lemmy.zip · 13 pts · 166d
What you don’t understand is the size requirements those radiators would need to have to cool an entire data center.
fallaciousBasis@lemmy.world · -10 pts · 166d
It's conserved.
athatet@lemmy.zip · 4 pts · 166d
Right. Exactly zero understanding on your part.
fallaciousBasis@lemmy.world · -5 pts · 166d
Zero effort shit post. Cool.
Do you ever make posts that demonstrate what your opinions are or what your own thoughts are or do you just like to talk about other people and put them down cuz it makes you feel better?
BeardededSquidward@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 7 pts · 166d
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?
anomnom@sh.itjust.works · 4 pts · 166d
Yeah so there is some confusion here. The are radiators on cars or in houses, but those are more accurately heat exchangers. Then there are things like heat lamps, which are really IR radiators that convert electricity to infrared light that feels hot.
Most of the heat you feel at a camp fire is radiant from the flame, unless you are down wind and feeling some convective heat, but most of that heat goes straight up with the smoke.
BeardededSquidward@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 0 pts · 166d
There's a difference certainly but do you think the people who seem to be floating this idea know the difference?
anomnom@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 165d
Hard to say, but they’ve been using
resistiveradiative cooling In space a long time.Also a tech ingredients made a neat video about building one and radiating heat out into space from the ground. It was cool to see what happened when it was cloudy and stopped working.
mech@feddit.org · 0 pts · 166d
Radiators dissipate heat through...wait for it...
Radiation.
0x0@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 166d
Right... and a carpet is a pet you keep in your car, got it.
Arcadeep@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 166d
BeardededSquidward@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1 pts · 166d
Do you know how BIG they would have to be to dissipate a data center worth of heat to keep it as cool as on earth?
fallaciousBasis@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 165d
Do you?
fallaciousBasis@lemmy.world · -1 pts · 165d
Do you know how much heat they would need to retain?
Fermion@mander.xyz · -1 pts · 166d
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 · 15 pts · 166d
XLE@piefed.social · 8 pts · 166d
And you can only build so many of those radiator panels before you start running into congestion problems. You don't want them radiating onto each other.
Devial@discuss.online · 9 pts · 166d
Fermion@mander.xyz · 3 pts · 166d
The area of radiator needed directly corresponds to the amount of power harvested by the solar panels. It doesn't matter what the load is. So a compute frame with the same amount of solar panels as the space station would need approximately the same radiatot area as the ISS, unless you are bringing nuclear power into the mix.
I agree that space based datacenters are a bad idea, but the thermals really are not the gotcha people are making them out to be.
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 166d
The solar panels needed is another problem for the space data center fantasy. Once you put together all the mass over enough surface area to make it work, you would blot out the sun worldwide.
fallaciousBasis@lemmy.world · -2 pts · 166d
They're called fins. Not panels.
Devial@discuss.online · 0 pts · 166d
fallaciousBasis@lemmy.world · -3 pts · 166d
lordnikon@lemmy.world · -5 pts · 166d
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 · 7 pts · 166d
Geostationary satellites are not standing still. They're orbiting the Earth at the same rate that it rotates "beneath" them.
nabladabla@sopuli.xyz · 4 pts · 166d
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.
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world · -1 pts · 166d
The heat would be moving at the same speed. Though, that does mean it wouldn't be any better in any other orbit.
Fermion@mander.xyz · 2 pts · 165d
Thermal energy is primarily dissipated as infrared light which moves at the speed of light. There is no way for space to accumulate heat. If that were the case the entire solar system would be unlivable. The IR emitted by satellites is truly negligible in comparison to the electromagnetic radiation emitted by the sun.
nabladabla@sopuli.xyz · 2 pts · 165d
Again, it doesn't help the case, but just.. no. The heat gets out of the spacecraft by radiating, and radiation doesn't move in a circular orbit around Earth, it moves at speed of light outwards from where it started.
wewbull@feddit.uk · 3 pts · 166d
Super heat what in that space? The point is there's nothing to transfer heat to. All you can do is radiate infra-red light.
Fermion@mander.xyz · 2 pts · 166d
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.
teft@piefed.social · 0 pts · 166d
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.
wewbull@feddit.uk · 2 pts · 166d
It'll be in shadow at midnight, yes, but not necessarily at any other time. Geostationary orbit is at about 7x the radius of the earth.
As such, the period when in will actually be in shadow is only a short period directly behind the planet.
mech@feddit.org · 96 pts · 166d
They're a great idea if you happen to own a company making AI, a company making rockets, and a company controlling public opinion.
chunes@lemmy.world · 22 pts · 166d
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.
skulblaka@sh.itjust.works · 16 pts · 166d
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.
bdonvr@thelemmy.club · 10 pts · 166d
I mean a data center barge or one in Antarctica would do much the same and be wildly cheaper and (relatively) more practical.
TachyonTele@piefed.social · 5 pts · 166d
But those aren't as "cool"
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 166d
Subpoena the ground stations if that was true?
skulblaka@sh.itjust.works · 4 pts · 166d
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.
elvith@feddit.org · 3 pts · 166d
Agreed. The US can access/subpoena any data it wants from US companies, even if the servers they host the data on are in Europe or Asia or...
It doesn't matter where the servers and the data is located. It matters who posses (or controls the access) to it.
jj4211@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 165d
Oh great, AI generated CSAM from space....
XLE@piefed.social · 1 pts · 166d
Little Space James
chaogomu@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 166d
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.
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 166d
Keep people from destroying data centers by having them destroy themselves? Is this some sort of zen koan?
Simulation6@sopuli.xyz · 2 pts · 166d
Have to destroy the rockets that are used to maintain them then and just wait.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 166d
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.
CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 166d
Wasn't it recently proven that the metals introduced into the upper atmosphere by satellites burning up depletes ozone? Its not a problem yet but maintaining constellations on the scale of cumulative several gigawatts of data centre would leave several tons of satellite burning up every single day. CFC Ozone hole is gonna look like a cloudy day in comparison.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 166d
I don't think anything was proven yet, but something came out saying it warranted more studying?
Satellites might need to be redesigned around it in the future and more studies should be done.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 166d
I just wanted to add another note
Even if this ozone thing turns out to not be true, there are still all sorts of other things being burned up in the atmosphere that can have other potential effects. It all needs to be studied given the size of these constellations.
I wouldn't be surprised if 50-60 years from now, if there is a real issue, that it eventually comes out that SpaceX or other mega constellation companies figured out it would be a problem, and just said nothing. Much like how big oil new CO2 was a problem forever ago and hid it.
Simulation6@sopuli.xyz · 1 pts · 166d
Pastry in spaaace! Still, eventually they will stop working.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 166d
If they stop working they will just de-orbit it early, or if they can't cause it's really broken, they'll just wait the ~5-10 years to come down on it's own.
TheSeveralJourneysOfReemus@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 166d
YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today · 4 pts · 166d
Also the whole being a vacuum thing makes heat dissipation much more difficult.
totesmygoat@piefed.ca · 3 pts · 166d
And an excellent way to scam a little. And fleece the flock
Ulvain@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 166d
That's an insightful way of putting it, 10 points.
WanderingThoughts@europe.pub · 56 pts · 167d
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.
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works · 54 pts · 166d
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.
KenOh@feddit.online · 29 pts · 166d
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.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 166d
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.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net · 11 pts · 166d
Maybe we should put datacenters on Mars, to warm it up.
Peppycito@sh.itjust.works · 16 pts · 166d
I'd rather on the moon. It'll melt all the cheese and there'll be fondue lakes!
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net · 9 pts · 166d
Whatever you do, don't put it on Jupiter! It'll get more stupider!
voodooattack@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 166d
What if we put it on Uranus though?
myrmidex@belgae.social · 1 pts · 166d
BeardededSquidward@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3 pts · 166d
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.
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 166d
Yep. Radiation is deadly to computers, and without the atmosphere to protect you there is a LOT of radiation in space.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 165d
seems the bottom of ocean equally stupid. in space you would have to deal with comsic/solar radiation damaging a satellite-type data center, and then you need solar cells/nuclear power, space debris is another problem.
a bottom of the ocean you would have to deal with the enormous pressures, even at several hundred feet down, corrosion, critters living or clogging up the 'buildings, silt.
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 164d
Yes, the bottom of the ocean is a terrible place to put a data centre. And the fact that it is, somehow, still a more practical option than space is a really good indicator of how unbelievably stupid the entire notion of space data centres is.
bufalo1973@piefed.social · 1 pts · 166d
I don't know if it would work but... Could an infrared laser expel enough heat?
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 166d
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.
elephantium@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 166d
Hmm, this has me thinking about the stealth ships in The Expanse. The engineering needed to make it work makes me want to cry, but in principle you could run a Peltier cooler with a swappable heat sink.
To be clear, I don't think this is a viable option, but it's interesting to think about.
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 166d
Basically the way you would make a stealth spaceship would be by focusing as much as possible on energy efficiency. At every juncture you would try to use as little power as possible, and use every bit of it as efficiently as possible, so that you're not remitting waste. That waste, in the form of heat, radio waves, etc, is what gets you spotted.
You could also run heatsinks temporarily for enhanced stealth as you suggest, then open up radiators to cool them - or eject them - once it's safe to do so.
(For the Elite: Dangerous players, yes, that game got it right.)
Kirp123@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 166d
You could cool them through radiative panels but you would need quite big panels to radiate away the heat a data center produces.
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 166d
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.
leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 165d
— David Brin, Sundiver, 1980
Here's an interesting discussion about the concept, with Brin himself explaining his reasoning.
LillyPip@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 166d
Oh, then the dipshit is definitely going to try it.
Avicenna@programming.dev · 50 pts · 166d
I don't think the point is to really build datacenters in space. The point is to convince investors that it can be done in a profitable manner so some people can create a fake businesses out of it and siphon money off the system. Much like the same as trying to convince investors that LLM + more money = AGI
kossa@feddit.org · 2 pts · 165d
It's a legal thing. No (real) jurisdiction. In space nobody will shut down Grok generating kiddo porn. It's basically the precursor for Epstein Island 2.0.
AA5B@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 165d
I also wonder if this is an entire red herring. There are increasing reasons for more compute in space, such as to pre-filter sensor data.
Is it to naive/optimistic to think no one is actually looking for a space datacenter to compute terrestrial loads, but they recognize the need for processing space loads?
architect@thelemmy.club · 1 pts · 165d
See now you all are thinking.
The rich wouldn’t tell us this shit if it wasn’t going to be used as some spin/distraction whatever it is.
brownsugga@lemmy.world · 38 pts · 166d
Don’t data-centers require massive cooling?
ramenshaman@lemmy.world · 21 pts · 166d
Yes, and it's easier to cool things on earth. In space, there's no air to help you cool thinks off, you can only reject heat through radiation. Most spacecraft are carefully designed to reflect heat/light on surfaces facing the sun and radiate heat into empty space from surfaces that are shaded.
AA5B@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 165d
In space there’s no epa
draco_aeneus@mander.xyz · 1 pts · 165d
What if you build it on an asteroid or moon or planet. Uranus is ~-225⁰C, right?
echodot@feddit.uk · 9 pts · 165d
Yes I'd like to build data centres on Uranus one of the most distant planets in our solar system, and also one without a solid surface but who's counting.
gramie@lemmy.ca · 9 pts · 165d
Yes, but the two-and-a-half hour lag each way would be a killer.
very_well_lost@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 165d
My understanding is that these "datacenters" would be used exclusively for model training, where latency doesn't matter.
It is still an outrageously stupid idea for a zillion other engineering reasons, though.
gramie@lemmy.ca · 3 pts · 164d
There's also the issue that around once a year the two planets will be on opposite sides of the sun. Not only would you have a lag of close to 3 hours, but communication would be completely impossible for a month or so at a time.
LwL@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 165d
It would need to have an atmosphere, so asteroids and most (all? Idk not an astronomer) moons are out.
Mars might be feasible at some point in the far future, but there's still the lag problem of 3-20 minutes depending on time of year, so not very useful for anything user facing.
very_well_lost@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 165d
Pretty much every moon but Titan. Titan, however, would be excellent for heat dissipation. Long before generative AI was even a thing, scientists have speculated that Titan would be the perfect place for datacenters because low-temperature computation is so much more efficient.
Of course, building a datacenter on Titan would be a several-hundred-trillion dollar endeavor, so... good luck bootstrapping your way into that industry.
matsdis@piefed.social · 1 pts · 160d
I heard they are investing into moonshot projects.
echodot@feddit.uk · -1 pts · 165d
None of the moons in our solar system have atmospheres. Earths moon is too small to hold on to an atmosphere, and the Galilean moons of Jupiter are too cold for an atmosphere, the gases just freeze.
The best place would be either a space station in low earth orbit or of the L4 or L5 point. The data issue would be the problem though I suppose you could just use the data centres for training but not for active processing but then you would need to build data centres on earth for that.
Given that you're going to build the earth data centres anyway you might as well do all of the processing on earth at the same time.
leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 165d
Except for Titan. Titan has a lot of atmosphere.
Ftumch@lemmy.today · 32 pts · 166d
There's another problem that nobody mentions. Putting thousands of additional satellites into space would seriously increase the risk of Kessler Syndrome occurring.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 166d
This isn't true for low orbit items. They will come down on their own in ~5 years.
At the absolute worst case scenario, we'd be blocked or ~5 years. Maybe 10 years if they put it a little higher.
Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz · 6 pts · 166d
Collisions in LEO can chuck debris into orbits which intersect higher orbits. If one of those collides with something in in said higher orbits, you have a problem.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 166d
It's possible it could go to a higher orbit, but we don't have mega constellations in those orbits. I don't know enough to know how far something could get flung up either, but I suspect if you're in a 5y orbit, you aren't reaching a 50y orbit area, and probably not even a 10y orbit area.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 165d
Any orbit resulting from a collision will pass through that collision point unless there's another collision to change it's velocity again. The higher a collision sends an object, the more likely the "orbit" intersects with more atmosphere to cause drag, or it might even collide with the ground without drag.
echodot@feddit.uk · 1 pts · 165d
I sincerely doubt that a collision in low earth orbit is going to result in debris being flicked up into geostationary orbits, the energy differences involved are just monumental.
Blackmist@feddit.uk · 3 pts · 165d
At this point I feel we'd just be immunising the rest of the universe from human stupidity.
echodot@feddit.uk · 1 pts · 165d
Little bit of a nitpick but Kessler syndrome doesn't care about how many satellites you have, and more about how many dead satellites you have hanging around on random orbits. You could put hundreds of millions of satellites in space as long as you had some sort of decommissioned program. You can always send up rockets if you can just move the satellites out of the way / know where they are.
Ftumch@lemmy.today · 2 pts · 165d
Dead satellites do add a much larger risk than satellites that can be steered, sure. If we stopped steering all our satellites right now, I believe it'd only take a few days before a collision occurred.
However, every satellite in orbit adds to the risk, especially if a chain reaction starts happening and it becomes very hard to avoid the shrapnel flying around. Or if a once-in-a-century-type solar flare takes out a bunch of satellites.
Edit: Basically, the best way to prevent Kessler Syndrome from occurring, is to keep the number of satellites in orbit below the threshold where it could occur.
JackFrostNCola@aussie.zone · 1 pts · 165d
In the future cleaning up our LEO zone will be a problem like cleaning up the rubbish in the oceans.
mechoman444@lemmy.world · 25 pts · 166d
The idea of putting data centers in low Earth orbit sounds cool at first. It feels futuristic. It feels like something that should be efficient. It is not.
Yes, space is cold. Yes, you get a lot of solar power. Those are the two points everyone repeats. What they leave out is basic physics and cost.
Cooling in space is not free. There is no convection. Heat only leaves through radiation. That means giant radiator panels. AI racks throw off massive heat loads. The more compute you add, the more radiator surface area you need. That adds mass. Mass costs money to launch.
Even with companies like SpaceX driving launch prices down, it is still extremely expensive per kilogram. And servers are not permanent infrastructure. They get replaced every three to five years. You cannot economically upgrade racks in orbit the way you do in a building on Earth.
Then you have radiation. Either you harden the electronics, which makes them slower and more expensive, or you accept higher failure rates and build in heavy redundancy. Maintenance becomes a logistical nightmare. A failed power supply on Earth is a service call. In orbit it is a robotics problem.
Meanwhile hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google put data centers next to cheap power, fiber backbones, and cold climates. It is boring. It is practical. It works. Orbital data centers only make sense if we already have large scale industry in space. We do not.
And what really makes these threads irritating is the obvious rage bait framing. Throw up a clickbait title about AI destroying the planet or Big Tech trying to escape Earth and you attract people who already hate AI. The discussion stops being about engineering and economics and turns into ideological noise.
If someone wants to seriously debate energy efficiency or scaling limits, fine. But pretending near Earth orbit is some obvious solution is not serious analysis. It is a cool sci fi concept. It is not a rational infrastructure strategy.
Avicenna@programming.dev · 4 pts · 166d
The whole point is that it is cool so that it can be hyped up like AGI and then sold.
benny@reddthat.com · 2 pts · 166d
You mean more socialism for the already rich.
mechoman444@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 165d
It is consistently amazing to me how many people use the word socialism on this platform and have no idea what it means.
XLE@piefed.social · 1 pts · 165d
It's a phrase often used by Martin Luther King Jr
mechoman444@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 165d
Yes. It is indeed a phrase often used.
jj4211@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 165d
To add to your point about logistical nightmare, Microsoft tried an underwater datacenter. Even right there, just a little bit underwater was absolutely not worth it.
Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org · 2 pts · 165d
Really? I would have figured the Rapture route would be workable with the right engineering. Especially given the massive amounts of borderline free cooling and non-existing regulatory environment if outside territorial waters.
jj4211@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 165d
Possible, but just not worth it. In their case it was barely underwater in some shallows. Go full Rapture without ADAM and it's just untenable.
prenatal_confusion@feddit.org · 1 pts · 165d
Servers get replaced that often because they are using too much energy for too little computing power compared to newer generations. If the module is already up there and functioning and energy is free then it's a whole different thing.
Defects are another topic.
And the whole thing is obviously crazy for a whole lot of other reasons.
jj4211@lemmy.world · 24 pts · 165d
Ridiculous, you can't have cloud computing in space, there's no atmosphere!
Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml · 22 pts · 166d
Of course they are, same with undersea data centers (for different reasons).
But it doesn't matter. In the late-stage capitalism we find ourselves in, you don't need a real product, nor a promising prototype. You don't even need a good idea, you just need the promise that you'll come up with a good idea soon. That's enough to get the investors drooling, the shareholders hyped, and the gullible idiots engaged.
And you only have to maintain that long enough to pay yourself and your insiders some fat checks. Then when inevitably, reality barges in and people start to realize it was all bullshit and pipe dreams, you've already cashed out. If your PR team is good, the media and your sycophantic fans will praise you as a visionary who was simply, "ahead of their time." And you can go on to rip off more people.
It's basically Patreon scams but with billions of dollars.
Murdoc@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 166d
Interesting. So the "post-truth era" isn't just for the masses, but the rich as well, as they cannibalise each other.
maplesaga@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 166d
Late stage capitalism just means late stage fiat currency doesn't it, since all the money flooding in is debt and QE, and every dollar created and placed into the market is new cheap debt issuance?
Then we bail all the bad debt out when it fails, so the perverse incentive to issue bad debt is always there, because its not capitalist and nobody would backstop this mess if it was their own capital.
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 166d
You can have late stage capitalism with any monetary system. Though relying on inherent value tends to leave poor people in much worse conditions much more quickly.
maplesaga@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 166d
If anything it seems more like crony capitalism, when the CPI is understated and all investments are excluded it drives down borrowing rates and bond yields, which raises stock values and provides a stream of revenue to those with access to the most credit.
People like Elon Musk who avoid paying taxes by borrowing cheap debt, which who would lend to him their own capital when his collateral is Tesla stock and silly ideas like space datacenters. Which is entirely built on speculation and pumps to new all time highs whenever QE is unloaded into the market; they would be taking the risk that Tesla doesnt go to 0 for a small fixed income payout, if it was their own money and a bailout wasnt guaranteed.
Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml · 4 pts · 166d
Everything you described falls under the umbrella of Capitalism.
Capitalism will always result in this sort of devolution, because it rewards this sort of behavior.
Constant GDP growth fuels capitalist enterprises because valuations go up and Capital is expanded. That incentivizes governments to make access to Capital easier and regulations on growth looser, which the firms themselves favor in terms of lower taxes, cheaper loans, larger capital markets, etc.
How many business leaders lobby, vote, and push for higher general taxes, stronger labor rights, stricter regulations, and more expensive loans?
The only time you'll see them doing any of those things, is when it directly hurts one of their major competitors.
This makes perfect sense within a Capitalist framework, because private ownership of the means of production and increasing profitability are literally the core of Capitalism. So of course Capitalists will always tend towards what makes the most money.
All the worst traits of modern Capitalism, (Everything is a subscription, planned obsolescence, shrinkflation, extreme litigiousness over patents and copyrights, ads in everything, predatory pricing & monetization) are the logical result of a Capitalist system.
Treczoks@lemmy.world · 19 pts · 166d
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.
Thorry@feddit.org · 10 pts · 166d
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.
SaltySalamander@fedia.io · -1 pts · 166d
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.
Thorry@feddit.org · 2 pts · 166d
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.
db2@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 166d
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.
FanciestPants@lemmy.world · 16 pts · 166d
Naive question, but would bit-flip also be a problem without the atmosphere to shield (some) radiation?
ayyy@sh.itjust.works · 16 pts · 166d
Thats not a naive question at all. You’re totally right. The term to learn about this is “rad-hardened computing”. It’s a solved problem, but the solution involves a buttload of redundancy and extra silicon with huge performance reductions compared to non-hardened tech.
It’s less of an issue if you’re in the shadow of the sun but still quite a big issue.
ErmahgherdDavid@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 4 pts · 166d
So they would need to swallow up even more of our chip fab production and push ram and SSD prices even further through the roof for checks notes ah yes... the same functionality as they have on earth.
AI is already unprofitable because of the insane hardware requirements and the fact that no company has a "moat" so there is a race to the bottom pricing-wise... I can't imagine anyone also then accounting for building space-hardened kit and getting it into space and dealing with shortened lifespan of the kit is ever gonna see a return.
All this just so that a chatbot can confidently tell people the wrong stuff
DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 166d
Yes but also no. Bit flips will happen unless you have rad-hardened computers but apparently, bit-flips are not really too problematic for LLM training. I guess when correct answers are optional, correct buts are as well.
Eximius@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 165d
I can't tell if "correct buts" is just a genius detail in this comment... Or a genius happy little bitflip accident.
Avicenna@programming.dev · 3 pts · 166d
talks about this, in conclusion yes
prenatal_confusion@feddit.org · 3 pts · 165d
Not trying to be an asshole, just giving info: the radiation shielding on earth is achieved (mostly?) by the magnetic field that diverts the big particle cannon ammunition.
Prior_Industry@lemmy.world · 16 pts · 166d
Mr Musk has to justify that 1.75t valuation somehow
jj4211@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 165d
I love how his rationale is that manufacturers of natural gas generator parts are backordered o 2030, so instead of... I don't know, spinning up more natural gas hardware or terrestial power generation, the easiest solution is to go from 11 attempts/0 successful launches of a space platform to tens of thousands of launches a year carrying unprecedented mass of bullshit into orbit...
brucethemoose@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 166d
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.
lemmydividebyzero@reddthat.com · 5 pts · 166d
I wish them the same success that the metaverse once had.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 166d
Well, that’s just it. Facebook makes so much money their Metaverse failure doesn’t even matter, they can just write it off and Zuckerberg faces zero consequences.
This is the same. These guys could burn many billions on space data centers, get zero returns, yet face zero consequences, essentially leaving the rest of the world with the bill/wasted work.
That’s tragically dysfunctional.
iampivot@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 165d
The thing that people miss in this is that the feature they're seeking by putting servers in space is only to have servers outside of any jurisdiction, with the advantages that it might bring
TheFinn@discuss.tchncs.de · 8 pts · 165d
Whatever company owns it will be responsible for it. That company will answer to whoever it needs to here on earth.
mad_djinn@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 165d
you think us sub-millionaires have any power in government, huh?
REDACTED@infosec.pub · 3 pts · 165d
Imagine spending 10 years to build a server in space to avoid some law and next month government changes the law
hansolo@lemmy.today · 2 pts · 165d
This is 1 million% what's at play here. Tech bros HATE that they have to deal with stupid laws, and putting a server outside of the jurisdiction of literally every country is a dream. A giant server ship has to dock, it needs fuel....not so with something in orbit (in Elon fantasy land anyway)
quips@slrpnk.net · 1 pts · 165d
Now that is actually smart
humanspiral@lemmy.ca · 14 pts · 166d
Before even considering radiation damage, hopium $200/kg launch costs mean 15c/kwh electricity. The you add the cost of specialized panels and radiation emitters. At least 20x that of earthly systems.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 166d
Okay, but have you considered how cool it would be to put a data center in space?
What if I told you that we have to BEAT CHINA to space?
humanspiral@lemmy.ca · 8 pts · 166d
BEAT CHINA to space is for sure the magic words, but even better, what I told you to come up with an excuse to merge my space company with my AI company, and even though it is a paper transaction with no money changing hands, increase my wealth by $300B for the price I set!
hmmm... beat china does sound better.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 166d
China...CHINA!!
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 166d
Gotta love the eternal threat of the "yellow peril"
5too@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 165d
Red Menace, Yellow Peril... Who've we got coming up for the Green Trouble?
Avicenna@programming.dev · 2 pts · 166d
Ahhh China. What would US presidents do without China...
Krunchiebro@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 166d
The real issue with space-based data centers isn't just whether they’re a "bad idea" from an engineering perspective; it’s that they represent the ultimate transition toward a vertically integrated, unregulated monopoly. While everyone is focused on the technical hurdles, we need to look at who actually benefits from this shift. For someone like Elon Musk, this isn't just a project—it's a way to own the entire global internet stack. Because he owns the "truck" (SpaceX) and the "road" (Starlink), he can launch and link these data centers essentially for free. This creates a market that is so tightly locked into one ecosystem that it can never be challenged by a terrestrial competitor.
From a purely operational standpoint, space turns every earthly liability into a superpower. Data centers on the ground are a nightmare of land taxes, massive water consumption for cooling, and constant strain on local power grids. In orbit, those costs vanish. Heat is radiated into the vacuum for free, and solar power is available 24/7 without weather or night cycles getting in the way. Even the physical security is inherently top-notch because the hardware is literally unreachable. When you combine that with a mesh network like Starlink, the need for laying fiber lines disappears entirely. The user just needs an antenna, and the "gatekeeper" handles everything else in the sky.
The terrifying downside is that this creates a jurisdictional black hole. If a server is orbiting 500km above the Earth, whose laws actually apply to the data stored on it? We’re talking about a "gated community" where the ownership, pricing, surveillance policies, and privacy standards are all controlled by a single entity with zero competition or government oversight.
Once we stop building ground infrastructure and rely solely on the "space cloud," we lose all leverage. It’s an engineering miracle for the person who owns it, but it’s a democratic nightmare for the rest of us. It’s not just a bad idea; it’s the construction of a digital kingdom that sits physically and legally beyond our reach.
0x0@lemmy.zip · 17 pts · 166d
Is it though?
TORFdot0@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 166d
Granted I never made it further than freshman level physics in college but doesn’t heat needs a media to radiate away. Otherwise it just stays in place? So there would be nothing to move the heat away from installation? The ISS uses these big radiators the emit the waste heat as infrared light. That seems like a plausible method to exhaust waste heat. But I don’t have any clue if that can scale up to the level of a huge data center compared to the systems on the ISS
ATS1312@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 5 pts · 166d
Heat is energy as "vibration of molecules". It spreads to adjacent molecules by conduction, unless we have other interesting things going on. Easy stuff.
Vacuum is the absence of molecules to conduct heat to.
Wait...
cammoblammo@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 166d
Well, it can also radiate away in the form of EM radiation, typically infrared. That takes time though.
jj4211@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 165d
Yes, ISS radiates heat to space. The total ISS power burden and by extension heat dissipation need is less than a lot of these GPU racks. They need big radiators just for that. Imagine ISS sized radiators per rack of equipment, how for apart the equipment would have to be, how much more mass cost for launch that is, etc etc...
brucethemoose@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 166d
Citation needed.
And on water usage, I will point out that gas generators and evaporative cooling are only used on Earth because other methods (geothermal, big radiators, heatpumps) are somewhat more expensive... Not, like, orders of magnitude more expensive like pure radiative cooling in space.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 166d
We already radiate heat away just fine in space, it's just a matter of how much space do you need to use to do it and all the implications of what that would mean for any given satellite. I wouldn't call it free, because you need the hardware to do it and the extra weight reduces the payload capacity of whatever you're sending up, but we can do it.
Starlink also uses laser links to talk to each other which these satellites would also use. How they work can depend, but generally they bounce around in space until they can't, and they might come back down to land, to move somewhere else over fiber to another ground station until they can go back up to reach you. But the more laser links the less they have to come down for technical reason, but they might still come down for bandwidth reason. I don't really know how likely it is that any given connection is point to point.
Example of what could happen.
Your dish -> starlink -> starlink -> ground station -> Google -> ground station -> starlink -> ground station -> starlink -> groundstation -> starlink -> starlink -> your dish.
Fiber is still the better option on land if you can get it there, but there are a lot of places it's never going to get laid, and will never be in the air, or on bodies of water.
Edit: Corrections on the laser links with an example.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 166d
On radiators, plugging it into this formula:
https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/heatrad.php
I get a circular radiator at least a kilometer wide, assuming the radiator is quite efficient, a rather modest datacenter, and very hot coolant (70C).
…Realistically, the coolant temperature would need to be much lower. See how it’s a power of four in the formula? That means the radiator area gets very large real quick.
I cannot emphasize how expensive a functional 1km+ radiator would be in space. It’s mind bogglingly expensive.
If a space datacenter is in LEO like Starlink, then it’s in Earth's shadow a lot of the time, and would have to be “part” of the starlink network constantly zooming over the ground. If it’s geosynchronous, then laser communication (or any communication) gets real tricky, and latency is limited by the speed of light. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but reliable high data rates would be an expensive engineering challenge.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 166d
For 100kW? I'm not going to try and figure things out from that massive site. A pre made calculator would have been nice if they had one.
edit: It is going to be LEO and likely connected to starlink with the same laser link they use.
Edit: Looking at orbits they might use sun synchronous orbits? It might not be in sun 100% of the time, but they are nearly always in sun.
Edit: I have no way to know if this is right, but a couple AI responses are saying for 100kW it would be ~150-170 square meters with temperatures around 70c
brucethemoose@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 166d
100kW? Nvidia BGX 200 servers are 14kW each, not counting the interconnect, or anything else. According to nuggets I’ve read online, we’re talking 200 megawatts for an Earth-based AI datacenter these days, without something exotic like underclocked Cerebras WSEs (which would be pretty neat, actually…)
Plugging 200 megawatts into this:
https://www.calctool.org/quantum-mechanics/stefan-boltzmann-law
I get about 0.46 square kilometers, depending on the coolant temperature, and ultimate efficiency of the system (with how you orient the thing relative to solar panels, how you circulate coolant…)
I have no clue what the construction of such a huge structure would look like, but if it was a simple 0.5 inch aluminum sheet, it would weigh like 15,000 metric tons. Even much thinner, that’s still on the order of “mass of a cargo ship”
Why is that, though?
Well, something like the ISS doesn’t generate much heat, and hypothetical rockets that need big radiators have very hot coolant to dissipate heat quickly. But space data centers are the sinister combination of “tons of waste heat” and “needs a low coolant temperature.”
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 166d
They aren't making a datacenter like on earth. They're putting up a ton of satellites that will each generate about 100kW.
Everyone keeps thinking they're putting these massive things up there, they are not doing that.
Edit: Oh I missed your tool this time was a real calculator this time, thank you! That says 127 square meters, with black body, 70c and 1 (but no idea if those are good values)
brucethemoose@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 166d
That’s interesting, but what’s the point? If it’s like 2 DGX boxes in each satellite, spaced out, the interconnect between them is going to be very slow, and the individual computational power of each satellite will not be that impressive.
And if you connect them all in one constructed mesh and wire them together, well, you’ve made a 200MW datacenter! The economies remain the same.
If hardware gets more power efficient, well… Then why do you need to go to space anymore?
Krunchiebro@lemmy.world · -1 pts · 166d
Thoughts?
tedach@lemmy.zip · 11 pts · 166d
Pardon my potential ignorance, but I'm under the assumption that radiating heat in vacuum is NOT easy. Normally, heat escapes from sources into the surrounding atmosphere, whereas in space, only radiant heat (IR?) can bleed off into vacuum. The conductive heat from, say, a cycling loop of water still needs a radiator that vents into surrounding volume. Without atmosphere, radiators can't conduct efficiently, right?
Please set me straight if possible.
Murdoc@sh.itjust.works · 6 pts · 166d
I'm no expert, but this is my understanding as well.
rimu@piefed.social · 7 pts · 166d
These are my thoughts https://distantprovince.by/posts/its-rude-to-show-ai-output-to-people/
Krunchiebro@lemmy.world · -1 pts · 166d
Your thoughts were really well written. I'm glad you took the time to explain your viewpoints organically instead of taking an easy way out to avoid having to do it yourself.
How about this for what my post was trying to say....
It's a good idea to the person who can pull it off. It will be highly profitable and they will monopolize that ecosystem. For the rest of us, if this were ever to become adopted wide spread, it has the potential to make something that normal people can no longer compete with and can't easily avoid (assuming it is significantly subsidized initially to offset cost and get users to adopt it)
MissesAutumnRains@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1 pts · 166d
I'm no expert, but I feel like a data center in space is a super niche use case. Bandwidth seems like it would be a major issue. Heat seems like it would as well. And as you said, jurisdiction would be a problem that many businesses wouldn't necessarily want to contend with.
While the devices are difficult to get to physically, should an adversarial state actor send something up, it's not like we could stop them from accessing the devices in a way we could if they were within the borders of a country. They're harder to reach for smaller adversaries, and significantly easier for bigger ones. Not to mention significantly harder for us to repair if something goes wrong.
I'm not saying data centers in space are a bad idea in general, but I am not seeing a huge benefit to them right now.
Reygle@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 165d
Considering the ludicrous price to put each pound of equipment into orbit, I'd like to invite them to send as much hardware as they can in to (high) geostationary orbit so they can find out how well a vacuum does NOT promote radiating heat
Edit: also forgot about solar radiation flipping bits. I love the idea of them having to reboot the machine (if they even can) remotely once ever 15 minutes
Peppycito@sh.itjust.works · 11 pts · 166d
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.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 166d
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.
0x0@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 166d
Send Musk to Mars.
toofpic@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 167d
Was the title written by Trump?
lemmydividebyzero@reddthat.com · 18 pts · 167d
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.
bufalo1973@piefed.social · 6 pts · 166d
... with tears in their eyes and saying "thank you, Sir"
grte@lemmy.ca · 14 pts · 166d
It's referencing a book.
toofpic@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 166d
Oh, thanks. I felt something is "unusual" about it.
Simulation6@sopuli.xyz · 8 pts · 166d
Classic literature
toofpic@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 166d
Thanks!
elephantium@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 166d
Alexander, is that you?
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 166d
Dumping heat in space is actually hard to do. You'd need huge radiators for radiative emission cooling.
Mihies@programming.dev · 9 pts · 167d
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.
Deestan@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 166d
Not to mention that one time he saved all those trapped kids with his custom-built submarine.
Mihies@programming.dev · 2 pts · 166d
Ah right, he also saved them from the "pedophile".
M0oP0o@mander.xyz · 9 pts · 166d
Maybe for a space based population a data center in space would work. This is just taking off site hosting too far.
some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 166d
"beyond the cloud" 🤮
very_well_lost@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 165d
Introducing: Microsoft Cosmos!
Send your data to heaven while we turn the planet into hell!
elucubra@sopuli.xyz · 5 pts · 166d
Plus the problem of having my data hosted, not just In another country, but In a different celestial body!
M0oP0o@mander.xyz · 4 pts · 166d
Ah shit, this is all for child porn again.... Can the fucking tech industry just not do this every few months?!
kinther@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 166d
As someone who designs and builds networks as a profession, I don't see this being a great idea. Maybe I just don't have all the facts.
I am leaning heavily on the example of M$ trying an underwater datacenter, which they decommissioned and have not pursued further. Put a node of compute somewhere and eventually it will become obsolete or unusable due to hardware failure. Not to mention the energy requirements and cooling needed in space. Waste heat does not just dissipate unless it has a heat sink, which adds more volume and mass to the payload!
0x0@lemmy.zip · 9 pts · 166d
Turns out you can't cool something just by putting it in space because most heat transfers require convection, which requires a medium, say, air.... which is notably lacking in space.
mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 7 pts · 166d
Yeah, heat dissipation is surprisingly difficult in space, because the only real way to do it is via radiation. And radiation is one of the least effective methods of dissipating heat.
The vast majority of heat transfer on earth happens via physical contact, in the form of fluids or solids touching each other. That’s what a heat sink is for. It increases surface area, so more fluid (air) can touch it and carry heat away. But without some sort of fluid contact, a heat sink isn’t going to help much. It’ll act as a radiator, but the cooling efficiency will only be a fraction of what is achieved via traditional forced air cooling.
enumerator4829@sh.itjust.works · 5 pts · 166d
Space ain’t happening.
I can see the point of underwater datacenters though, for some very specific use cases. Compute heavy workloads with high energy densities could possibly make sense to ”free cool” below water. DLC everything and pump the heat straight into the ocean.
reksas@sopuli.xyz · 7 pts · 166d
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.
lemmydividebyzero@reddthat.com · 1 pts · 166d
Maybe, the destruction of earth is part of the calculations. If earth is gone, space might be an option.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 166d
Kinda feels like at this point it's not "if". It's "when".
reksas@sopuli.xyz · 1 pts · 166d
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.
bufalo1973@piefed.social · 2 pts · 166d
Wasn't that the script of Elysium?
reksas@sopuli.xyz · 2 pts · 166d
it was? havent watched it. I really hope it wont ever come to that, but knowing what those monsters do to kids it wouldnt surprise me if they wanted to make that movie into reality.
jacksilver@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 166d
I feel like on part no one ever mentions on things like this are, how do you enforce any jurisdiction on a satellite and what it's doing.
The main crazy thing about a satellite data enter is you can't confiscate it and therefore you can't control it. Hell once it's up there the only thing any government might be able to do is find the owner and force them to crash it (if possible).
It in a sense sounds a bit like the wild west of the original internet. Admittedly Musk being at the forefront of it all sounds terrible, but I think there is something fascinating about an information hub that could be completely independent of any country.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 166d
How do you enforce jurisdiction?
That sounds like a feature, not a bug.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 166d
I'm pretty sure that's the point TBH.
Kinda scary when the context is these kinds of corporate systems, though.
jacksilver@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 166d
Yeah, that was my point. Like all technology it has potential to liberate communications, but also enable bad actors. However, to me, it's the biggest reason why this technology would matter at all.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 166d
Fair.
I’m pretty sure that’s a plot point in some cyberpunk-ish sci fi.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 166d
You threaten to disable it, which would be very easy give how fragile it is
jacksilver@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 166d
Disabling/destroying a satellite has only been shown to be feasible by a handful of militaries in the world in very controlled situations.
Unless you mean you disable it via commands to the satellite, but that assumes there is a way to disable it and that you know who can disable it and can force them to do so.
drspectr@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 165d
Well its a great ideal if you happen to be a company with a space program, sounds like a very lucrative venture.
outerspace@lemmy.zip · 6 pts · 165d
Wouldn't it be cheaper to put it underground?
AA5B@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 165d
In either case the installation cost and infrastructure costs are excessive and the I/o is probably limited
Lucky_777@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 165d
Also couldn't power it with the sun. Which is infinite and free power
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 165d
still have to deal with space debris, and the radiation damaging/wearing down the equipement overtime.
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca · 5 pts · 166d
LOL don't worry, like all the Space Nutter fantasies from the 1950s onwards, they are wildly impractical and will never, ever happen.
postmateDumbass@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 166d
But the dads that never loved them are dying, this is their last chance to try to earn that love by recreating the sci fi fever dreams of the 1950s.
Doomsider@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 166d
By the time you launched and assembled one in orbit their hardware would already be outdated. Sounds like a great plan!
Paranoidfactoid@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 165d
Just tell Elmo to add bigger CPU and GPU fans. That'll work.
Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 166d
Shame you can't do some sort of thermoelectric power generation thingie with all the heat from these data centres.
WolfLink@sh.itjust.works · 8 pts · 166d
You can’t turn pure heat into useful energy. Thermoelectric generators tap into the transfer of heat between a hot reservoir and a cold reservoir.
Avicenna@programming.dev · 1 pts · 166d
So assuming a water cooloant system, the water is heated and then the question how efficiently can you use this to generate energy? Even the simplest scenerio of pumping this water to a place where hot water is needed and would normally be produced by heating it with gas or elecetricity is a means of producing energy. Wouldn't probably work here though as the water coolant system is a closed loop so you can't have water leave the system. It still could pass through another reservoir of water to heat it up which then could be used for other purposes. But don't know about specifics enough to guess whether or not this is feasible.
Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 4 pts · 166d
It's as stupid as solar roadways, a solution nobody asked for and we also already have way better solutions.
I mean why.
Doomsider@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 166d
Solar roadways are the future! Driving on solar panels is the only way forward. Until all our roads are solar we will never be free people.
Zos_Kia@jlai.lu · 4 pts · 166d
Interestingly NASA had an idea of a plan that sounds at least technically possible, but it's a multi-decade operation and doesn't look anything like what the current startups are pitching. Of course you can have your data centers in space, why the fuck not, but a data center sits on top of a lot of boring old infrastructure which nobody's excited to talk about.
It's going to be prohibitive if you have to pay the gravity tax every time you want to move 1 ton of metal, so realistically this kind of high-tech project cannot even begin without having substantially industrialized the moon. Nothing fancy but you'll need at least some mining and refining, and solid trans-lunar logistics routes. Probably some housing for a bit of personnel too. At that point the space data center would be dwarfed by the size of its own support system.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 166d
I mean, making fuel is one thing. A future where we can manufacture electronics and spaceflight tech off Earth is far, far away. Like so far a lot of other technologies are going to scramble the economics anyway.
Zos_Kia@jlai.lu · 1 pts · 166d
Actually i was more thinking of crude metallurgy and materials processing. You could quite easily get aluminium from lunar regolith, and also tons of silicates. This allows you to produce shielding, radiators and the structural elements of solar panels without having to kaboom-boom the tons of raw material from the Earth. And it's not particularly high-tech stuff either, just some furnaces and basic extruding would go a long way. If you just have to ship the delicate electronics from Earth you're already saving a lot.
Mwa@thelemmy.club · 2 pts · 165d
cause of ping?
ianonavy@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 165d
There’s nowhere to dump heat! Modern data centers rely on heat exchange systems that move excess waste energy into the air or earth. The servers will be thermally throttled to a crawl.
Mwa@thelemmy.club · 1 pts · 165d
water cooling?
ianonavy@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 164d
Sure you can have fancy liquid cooling to move heat away from the processors, but you still need something to move the heat into. You can radiate it into space, but not quickly enough to do useful work 24/7.
Mwa@thelemmy.club · 1 pts · 164d
oh i get it
prenatal_confusion@feddit.org · 3 pts · 165d
No, that works well with Starlink for example. But only because it's in low earth orbit. In geostationary orbit You do in fact have a horrible ping.
Not being familiar with the details of this Elon brain fart I would hope they didn't aim for geostationary... Because why?? Then again who knows with that idiot.
Mwa@thelemmy.club · 1 pts · 165d
alr ty
jj4211@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 165d
If it's close enough for respectable latency, it's close enough to experience drag. Given the maddeningly high power/cooling and resultant large surface area, then that satellite will have a tendency to incur re-entry.
So either close enough for "ok" latency but will burn up relatively soon or high enough to keep an orbit longer but terrible latency.
prenatal_confusion@feddit.org · 1 pts · 165d
Hmm. Assuming you have some small hydrazine or whatever booster you could maintain a low orbit for a while. But yes not endlessly. That bring said there is a middle ground between 400km and 34000km that might provide for a good orbit and acceptable ping. That all depends on the application of course.
HubertManne@piefed.social · 2 pts · 166d
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.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 166d
It’s not speculation. Nvidia themselves have run experiments with GPUs in orbit, and the issue gets worse with smaller lithography (eg newer chips).
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 166d
They already run AMD chips on starlink, so they've figured out someway to shield them in most cases. Some solar flares at bad times (something about while raising orbits) has nuked some dishes before.
Its probably cheaper to account for some expected losses, than shield them perfectly.
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 166d
They're shielded by being in a very low orbit. I don't think that would work for a data center.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 166d
These are also going to be in a low orbit so they have good latency
HubertManne@piefed.social · 1 pts · 166d
Im pretty sure they are shielded as I think I have seen stuff like that for the electronics in the iss. Thing is that the eletronics in sattelites and the space station are pretty small relative to datacenters. The only benefit I can really see is maybe they can be solar powered which I guess if the panel acts as shielding and stays sun facing but all the extra expense of getting it up there. I just don't see it as practical. I mean technically it should either work or not basedo on cost as long as they don't wring out any subudies or soemthing.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 166d
I think everyone is really confusing what these datacenters are.
They aren't these massive things. They're going to be a little bigger than v3 starlinks all working together in some manner. The best estiamte we have on size is v3 is 20kW of power, and these will be ~100kW
Edit: also power doesnt necessarily mean size. The GPUs will put off more heat per size i bet than whatever is in starlink, and even if it 5x'd the size of the computing area of the dish compared to starlink, that's still tiny. It's the radiator that will take up the space, not the datacenter portion.
HubertManne@piefed.social · 2 pts · 166d
ugh so we are talking massive constellations. That is so much worse.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 166d
Ya its going to be massive, I imagine larger than starlink if these dreams come true.
MajorasMaskForever@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 166d
Spacecraft software engineer here:
They are and they aren't. Radiation causes problems in terms of Single Event Upsets where a 0 turns to 1 and a 1 turns to 0 for a super tiny second. CPUs take some amount of time to let the transistor circuit stabilize before moving onto the next instruction so if an SEU happens in the beginning of this period it won't have any downstream effects. Like a bump on the road.
Memory however is vulnerable to this tiny amount of time and can flip a bit to a different state than it's supposed to be, but both are solvable problems with hardware and software based solutions, with ECC being the most common.
The other major problem is Total Ionizing Dose. Put silicon based semiconductors in radiation long enough and they will break down, and there's no real hardware or software based solution to that. But it takes a long time
HubertManne@piefed.social · 2 pts · 165d
That is what I remember but it sounded like its a problem like that on earth with the massive atmosphere shielding and is exponentially worse in space.
itsblorpintime@lemmy.org · 2 pts · 165d
Whatever happened to resource efficiency, being able to do more for less energy? This whole thing is super unsustainable.
poVoq@slrpnk.net · 1 pts · 166d
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
Ranulph@thelemmy.club · -7 pts · 165d
Making reusable rockets is impossible and stupid. Electric cars are stupid and wont work. Satellite internet is too expensive and stupid. So far Elmo is batting 3 for 3 and I am going to bet he can make it work. Unlike the CyberTruck
mad_djinn@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 165d
none of these things "have worked" they just represent a privately subsidized shift in infrastructure and society. there is no such thing as progress, you progressive
gleaming eyes wide open
Ranulph@thelemmy.club · 0 pts · 164d
I am biased because I have starklink and love it. It works...but before Elon worked on his vision for re usable rockets it was a dream. He changed the world.
lemmydividebyzero@reddthat.com · 1 pts · 164d
More nuanced (and without using the word "stupid")
For sure, Elmo can somehow make profit out of it, e.g. by selling the space cloud usage as "can't be controlled by an government on earth" for a high price. But when we concentrate on the facts: It can't be more efficient than Azure or AWS on earth, at least not for the next decades.
Ranulph@thelemmy.club · 0 pts · 164d
The Russians spat at his feet when he asked to buy their rocket engines, lots of naysayers. I have and love my starlink.
workgood@lemmy.dbzer0.com · -16 pts · 166d
ATS1312@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 166d
For 10 bitcoin I have a
bridgeai datacenter in space I can sell youspicehoarder@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 166d
I've already made 100x on my space AI satellite