Anybody Who Thinks Orbital Data Centers are a Good Idea Is Suffering from AI Psychosis, Experts Argue
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405 replies
Two main problems with data centers. Power and cooling. In space the power is doable. The cooling is a major pain in the ass and always has been. There are only three ways to get rid of heat. Conduction, convection, and radiation. The first two don’t work because of the vacuum thing. The third is horribly inefficient. Just look at the ISS and the giant fins that only dumps about 70 kW of waste heat through radiator “wings” that weigh several tons. A single rack in a high density compute rack can generate 100kW by itself.
So yeah given the expensive and how inefficient it is, it’s a terrible idea.
Edit: I’m a system architect so dealing with data center heat is something I’m familiar with.
You're just too small minded to comprehend the grand vision of business genius™ Elon Musk!
And Bezos apparently…
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/bezos-says-the-only-thing-holding-back-orbital-data-centers-is-cost-not-science-as-he-says-ai-will-create-jobs-fc49d5d5
These chucklefucks are just trying to get some sucker… er I mean investor to fund the whole thing so their respective space companies can do the job.
And after doing to some very cursorary research other issues like…
Cant you see, were just around the corner for AI Humanoid Robots in FullSelfDriving™ Teslas heading towards their data center job in space
/s
There's also the very real problem of data transfer.
On land you just lay down another fiber optic cable and you can double your data transfer rate.
In space, you have to deal with cross talk and interference on a limited spectrum.
Free space laser communications are possible, but even then you are only talking about 10s of GB/s, and you cant add more lasers or receivers on a satellite already in orbit.
But if you have a constellation of thousands of LEO communications satellites to leverage...
Doesn't help, your laser (or RF comms if you are using them) can still only send out a fixed amount of data per second, it doesnt matter if it is being sent to the ground or another satellite, once it is launched there is a hard cap on how much data can flow into/out of it in a given time and there is no way to improve that.
That's what the lasers are for. It's a solved problem.
Not really, because it can't be solved, just worked around.
Lasers are still subject to the inverse square law, but with a slightly different multiplier.
Also, lasers still have the bandwidth issue of not being able to double up the communication lines due to cross talk and other fun physics issues.
There's a reason why fiber will never go out of style.
If it was a solved problem it would be widely used, but it isn't. Ever looked at the reports of starlink speeds? It's not reliable at all, everything other than a fully clear sky with cold weather (meaning less moisture and particles in the air) affects the communication. It physically can't be a good or better alternative to fiber (or anything else that isn't wireless).
Yeah... Terrestrial 5G towers with a fiber backbone for some proportion of them... are... stupendously more cost effective at getting a decent level of internet to a lot of people.
Also doesn't cause Kessler Syndrome, which is, you know, good.
Now, such a system will still suffer in more abberant atmospheric conditons, but to a far lesser extent.
Literally the only actual 'use case' I can think of where StarLink 'makes sense' as a better solution is ... you are a boat that is actually moving most of the time.
If you're a house boat... terrestrial 5G probably exists near your mooring.
Either that or you truly, truly live far away from civilization.
... but we already had satellite internet that did those things.
Agreed on the downlink.
I thought this was about the node to node communications. Blue origin and probably others are also using it for in orbit communication.
Other than the fact that the speed of light is a non negotiable constant.
What if we run a really long tube down to earth to send water back and forth? You gotta think like Elon to be innovative.
iirc the power is not very doable, You'd need hundreds of times as many solar pannels as are on the ISS to power a single modest data centre.
And at that point wouldn't the solar panels act as a sail and fuck with the data centers orbit?
Solar sail effect is going to be dwarfed by regular atmospheric drag in low earth orbit. At perfect right angles the radiation pressure on the panels is 4.5 micro-Pascals. Meanwhile, in low orbit there's enough residual atmosphere to generate a dynamic pressure (for drag) of 5 milli-Pascals, give or take (and strongly depending on the space weather).
So atmospheric drag is around 1000 times more than photon pressure. And the drag is big enough to be noticeable over weeks and months, requiring regular boosts to stay in orbit.
Maybe? Probably? For all I know, a solar-sail effect might help it stay in orbit.
Send it to a cold moon like Europa. Free cooling, plus A.I. is kept at a safe distance
Ummm….
Even better, the A.I. problem is solved. Hooray!
"give me a recipe for dinner"
...
...
....
(2 hours later for signal round-trip)
"Here you go:..."
Well of course, first you invent the ansible.
Yeah but space is cold. Just put the hotness out into space and it'll freeze just like in the movies.
/s
Do you have a podcast? I saw a podcast clip on tiktok saying almost verbatim the same thing
Not to my knowledge. But I assume this is nothing new and any reasonable person could come up with the same thing. I did google the ISS thing so that part may have come from there.
It would also be extremely vulnerable to rockets.
Basically they'd need about as much in radiator fin surface area as they would have in solar panel area. The ISS has 8 solar array wings, 35m x 12m, that can produce about 30 kW each, or 240 kW total, in sunlight (which is only half the time). The ISS has a complex cooling system, but relies on 4 radiators about 3.1 m x 13.6 m to reject up to 14 kW of heat each (56 kW total) for cooling the solar arrays themselves. The main cooling system uses 6 radiators, each 23.3 m x 3.4 m, to reject 70 kW of heat (from this report it sounds like each radiator may be capable of rejecting more than 1/6 of the heat but that the system as a whole needs to be kept under 70 kW of heat rejection).
So that seems like about 650 square meters of radiators can provide about 120 kW of heat rejection.
Today, a 72-GPU Blackwell server is 130 kW in a single server rack. The next generation rolling out now has 72 Rubin GPUs in a 230 kW server, in a single rack. And that's not even a "data center." That's just a single (albeit very powerful) server. How many can you string together, with networking equipment beaming data connections back down to the ground, before the ratio of solar panels and radiators to the actual ship size becomes unworkable?
That said, it's technically possible, especially if you can radiate the heat at higher temperatures than the ISS does, as the Stefan-Boltzmann law shows that the hotter the radiator, the more heat it can reject. Just completely infeasible from an engineering and economical standpoint, for any data center that hopes to be relevant in an age of 100+ MW data centers.
All they're sending up is 1 server rack. 125kw avg, 150kw peak.
Radiator needs to be ~twice as big as ISS, but we probably have improved their efficiency in recent years so maybe not twice?
The radiators would be about the same size as the solar panels. Both would have to be huge to run a rack full of GPUs.
Radiators work because they have something to radiate heat into. Space is famously empty, so a radiator the size of a planet would only work as a heat sink until the total heat in the system was high enough to make everything glow like a heating element, at which point you dump waste energy as visible light.
You can radiate heat into the vacuum of space, it’s just extremely slow compared to doing it into atmosphere. Vacuum is not a perfect insulator in this regard.
Think of it this way, if a vacuum was a perfect insulator, how would the sun radiate heat to Earth?
Your car radiator is actually using convection to convect heat into the air.
The spacecraft radiators use radiation to dump heat by emitting infrared photons. Photons do not require a medium. This type of radiator works by maximizing the area of hot surface exposed to empty space (which has an effective temperature of 3 K). They have to be pointed into a dark area and away from the sun. There's no advantage to fins, because you want to maximize area perpendicular to the dark sky.
Both devices are called radiators, but they are different kinds of devices.
The radiators dissipate the heat as infrared radiation. They work as long as they are pointed away from the sun or earth.
If they couldn't get rid of the heat, there would be no satellites or space stations.
they are trying ti in the ocean, they have to deal with corrosion , animals gettin encrusted on the surfaces, plus transportation and logistics.
Question
With space being so cold, doesn't that keep temps low? How does it all work
Space really isn’t cold. Temperature is a measure of how fast particles (atoms, molecules) are moving.
In a perfect vacuum with no particles at all, you literally couldn’t define a temperature, because there’s nothing around to jiggle
In order to understand why space is "cold", you have to understand how we, as humans, perceive temperature. What we feel as hotness or coldness is just how excited the molecules in the atmosphere are. Molecules very excited? It's hot. Molecules very still? Cold.
Space is vast. Incomprehensible to our puny human minds that have evolved to exist on this tiny mote of dust. Most of space is devoid of matter. Sure there's hydrogen and helium out there just floating around, but not enough of it for us to be able to feel. So space feels like cold, and indeed, is quite cold. But as the above poster explained, losing heat in space is fundamentally different than how we lose it on earth.
Your body generates heat to keep your squishy organs running smoothly. The way we prevent ourselves from overheating is we rely on perspiration and evaporation, but that only works if we have Earth-like conditions where airflow can carry that excess heat way from our bodies.
In space, there is no airflow. Your skin would freeze while your blood boils.
The same issue is present with our technology. Radiating heat is very, very inefficient in space because we need something to carry it away from the source that is generating it faster than it can generate it. At least with the tech, we can turn it off to let it cool slowly over time, but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem of having no way to efficiently cool an entire AI datacenter that is meant to be used to fill a continuous demand here on Earth.
I actually understand that. Thank you a detailed thoughtful reply
The solution, then, is a downsized dc.
I betcha it's not about economic or computational efficiency, it's about politics. They're data centers outside of any national borders, perfect for data laundering. It's leverage for corporations to transcend sovereign borders.
I mean, yes, but specifying a more specific cause of the delusional thinking is useful.
Space being "cold" doesn't matter since vacuum INSULATES.
it's not even cold...! The matter that DOES exist in it is very hot plasma but it's just really thinly spread out.
This is what I’ve been tearing my hair out over any time this comes up. If you put a computer in space it will heat up until it achieves incandescence. Which is bad for the performance.
This kills the
crabserver.and sheesh you sure ain't KIDDING! The amount of wattage in terms of thermal energy they'd have to radiate off would in fact LITERALLY require incandescence @.@;
for anyone else who stumbles across this comment section, i'm referring to "black body radiation" - it is specifically the thermal energy leaving something via radiating, and if it is radiating out at a high enough rate, that makes it glow. Even if we were not literally seeing the thermal radiation with our eyes, it is still technically incandescent in the infrared end of the spectrum!
(unless of course you're defining incandescence as specifically only when the radiation reaches all the way up into the visible wavelengths and frequencies... which, if so, that's quite fair really.)
But apparently still somehow good for The Economy™!
I don't have a good grasp on what technology exists for space, but I would assume that radiators of some sort would be possible. Not in the conventional way that they ineract with a medium to release heat, but instead that the radiators emit heated particles - kind of in the same way that water evaporates without boiling. With that being said, I have no idea what efficiency that would operate under, and I have no idea if such a radiator would be used up fast. It sounds like a terrible idea, but I don't posess the facts.
Some people don't believe in space travel because there is no air to push against in the way that jet engines work. But they fail to understand that space travel operates under other ways to generate force. I just don't want to end up in the same sort of argument as them, believing that it's not possible to cool down machines in space just because there is no medium for conventional cooling.
For an intro to real proven methods you can look up how the cooling for the ISS works. It's quite interesting, but takes a lot of space, for relatively little power.
Exactly. That was my assumption. I just think it's unfortunate that the arguments rely on that conventional cooling wont work rather than pointing out that the existing alternatives are very inefficient.
So is the plan is to use a heat-pump to cool the computers while getting some waste-product as hot as possible, and then eject the waste product? Or perhaps rather than ejecting it, the heat could be put into a large surface-area heat-sink thing to just radiate the energy black-body-style...
I think ideas like this are fair and reasonable if we have to have a data centre in space (for example, if we wanted people to live indefinitely on a space-colony or something like that). But its pretty clear that no plan will ever be anywhere near as good as what we can do on the planet's surface.
Building and operating these things on the Earth's surface is already expensive and resource intensive. And doing it in space is going to be a lot worse.
I agree. I just saw that the comments were only considering conventional heat dispertion to a surrounding medium and that it wouldn't work in space. I feel it would be counterproductive to base the arguments on that narrow idea, but much more productive to realize that there are alternatives, but the current alternatives are much worse.
Orbital data centers are a good idea if one wants to get massive golden parachutes that siphon money from all the investor cash that the entirely u realistic promises brings in. They are a grift that will most likely benefit Musk in the same way all his other pie int he sky bullshit does.
Being technically terrible hasn't really stopped that from happening with his other bullshit projects.
Orbital data centers are the new "hyperloop"
It's literally just taking the piss out of idiotic investors. Data Centers, AI, space, new frontier, new markets. It checks all the boxes to get idiots excited to dump money into your tech company so people keep talking about it because talking about it is what gets results. Hopefully nobody is dumb enough to actually try it, it's an absolute scam.
I mean, space construction companies are happy to try it.
If Bezos keeps giving them money, who are they to say no? It may not even all be a waste in the long run, as it could be a "testing ground" for future scientific missions.
I see it as a win-win.
Either Elom and his fellow dipshits waste a ton of cash chasing literal pie in the sky,
Or
A viable commercial presence in space is validated and terrestrial power needs eased.
/S
Can you all not even tell this or sarcasm?
Nah, you're not jaded enough yet, it'll be used to facilitate a wealth transfer. Huge wealth management firms will tie up venture capital in financing SpaceX and BO and smaller space construction firms in a boondoggle and when it fails to materialize a profit they will pocket the proceeds and the losses will be covered by taxes and retirement accounts.
They do this again and again. It's the kleptocracy playbook, they're just getting bigger and bolder and more in your face with it.
My bad. Edited.
Looool gotcha, assume half the people on Lemmy reading your comment are half asleep, either just waking up or going to bed.
Except when they put up about 70x new satellites then what we currently have up there, and cause a cascade of collisions that results in nothing being able to enter orbit (including humans travelling to space).
We're at 14k satellites.
100k is the cascade failure limit.
Space X is proposing one million satellites.
Edit: my "70x" figure is very fuzzy just-woke-up early morning math. No guarantees.
Edit 2: dang! One million divided by 14k is 71.428! I almost nailed it.
No, you don't get it. (Good job on the math though, btw)
Every AI gets to have one, huge Moonraker sized LLM space station. Grok Station 1, Gemini Geosynchronous, Claude Comet. Whatever. But all eggs in one huge solar-powered basket each.
Staffed by 1 or 2 humans each. Required. By law. Armed people. Because, of course they should have guns in space.
Then just see what happens. I bet it would be amazing.
Ok, I see your /s tag now. And no, it was not clear that you're being sarcastic, because I can't see your face or hear your voice. It's the reason Poe's law is a thing.
Better pitch: just put tons of people in the space station and they can type the "AI" responses!
I don't know how that even got past the brainfart stage. AFAIK nobody has actually demonstrated how that would really work.
Not saying this won't ever be a thing. But not in the lifetime of anybody on earth right now I don't think.
People don't understand just how difficult it is to cool stuff in space. Half of the shit sticking out of the ISS that people think are solar panels are actually radiant cooling systems, and the ISS will generate WAY less heat per volume than a data center.
Not to mention the power requirements would likely require more than solar unless they put solar panels up far bigger than anything put up there before.
I'm saying it
This whole idea reminds me of the "putting solar panels on highways" idea that keeps popping up from time to time. Anyone who has ever built anything understands how stupid it is. Even if you could do it, it still wouldn't make sense over just putting solar panels next to highways.
That, and solar windows.
Making an expensive solar panel that lets most of the energy pass through it, and is not mounted in a way to effectively collect solar energy, is a terrible idea.
I agree, that this is at the moment not a viable thing and especially the SpaceX "concept" is complete bullshit.
I do not agree with some of your points, since they are solved/irrelevant (e.g. "regular maintenance", "low latency") or could be overcome with reasonable tech advances (e.g. "rockets prohibitively expensive", "radiation shielding").
Let me steelman the argument a bit with this single bit of - sadly forgotten - "super cool and innovative tech": "Underwater data center", like project Natick (Microsoft) or the Chinese project:
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/chinas-hicloud-launches-wind-powered-underwater-data-center-targets-500mw-subsea-deployment/
Soooooo, if we will ever see something other than our current land based data centers, we will see millions of ocean data centers, before we will ever see a single commercial space data center.
Reasons:
Oh, and by the way, it is still not clear if even ocean data center will be viable. Just found this 😂
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/spacexs-orbital-data-centers-could-face-same-hurdles-microsofts-abandoned-2026-04-01/
There is an unsolvable compute problem. The average PC on earth has multiple bit-flips a year from cosmic rays. The space hardened chips we use are 50nm and the chips used from inference are 4 to 6nm. 50nm is far more cosmic ray resistant than 6nm because of the transistor size. Are we supposed to think making H100s with a 65nm process is possible? The speed of light creates a die size limitation as well.
Latency is a huge issue, but so is bandwidth.
Land based data centers will have multiple hundred gig (and faster) fiber connections to the outside world.
Replicating that level of bandwidth on wireless links to a satellite in any sort of stable way is (as you said) no triviality. I would even classify it as near impossible.
Unless it becomes cheaper than having a datacenter on earth per quanity of compute, it won't happen in any meaningful scale even if these issues are solved.
They'll manufacture it on the moon ofc. We won't ship it from earth.
It will never be an economic thing. Only unpluggable skynet military thing. The weight is not an issue. though. It's volume.
Weight is always the issue with lifting stuff into space. Volume might merely be an additional issue.
The $200/kg launch price target is based on 150 ton capacity. That's a $30m launch costs target. Volume/foldability matters the most because that is the actual constraint that limits datacenter launch to a single NVL72 size.
Projected cost targets from SpaceX, especially for Starship are only losely related to reality. Weight is what determines the minimal required energy input to lift something into orbit. Independently from SpaceX number magic. Volume, like I said, can be an additional bottleneck but never undo the above.
most of the fuel weight required is to lift the rest of the fuel. Fuel costs is about $1m for full load. Rest of cost is huge staff, maintenance, and capital cost of rocket.
Starship is huge. I dont know how tightly they can fold these expected dishes, but by weight, they can amd will do 60 starlink v3, and itd be 50 datacenter dishes equivalent. How many they can actually launch is going to depend on how well the solar and radiator folds down, so it might be a volume issue vs weight where they cant launch with the max weight capabilities of the ship.
What about the latency hit getting data back to earth?
You would need staff living up there to support them. Robotics isn't up to it.
The datacenters are only a little bigger than a v3 starlink. It's 1 rack of compute, around 125kw avg 150kw peak. The biggest part is the solar array.
Yea honestly, orbital data centers are the dumbest shit I've heard during this bubble, and a huge indication of peak bubble hype.
The bubble is like this at this point:
You could put em on the moon with a heatpump into the ground.
The cost per pound to get them there is insane.
They are seriously old in 2 years.
They could put them in deserts here with closed loop cooling.
or... hear me out... Maybe we DON'T NEED THAT MUCH AI....
The interior of the moon is not super cold. You could still run a heat pump, but I don't know what the conductivity is like.
"Near" the surface, it's apparently around -21C, but its one crazy trick is surface area for heat sync. Once we start pushing heat into it, we'd have to do it in a REALLY huge surface area. Moon trenching....
If you read the chart on that Wikipedia article carefully, the estimated temperature profile is based on data from two Apollo missions.
All of the Apollo missions spent all of their surface time during the lunar morning, relatively early into the 14-day lunar day. They did this partially because the cooling systems couldn't cope with the full heat of the day, and partially to ensure good backlighting during the landings.
So there is going to be some "diurnal" surface heating and cooling that is probably modeled but not measured.
pulled it off a science substack, lined up nicely with https://science.nasa.gov/moon/weather-on-the-moon/
was unaware that data was incorrect
I had a conversation with a colleague of mine about this. He believed that Musk's decision to merge xAI and SpaceX was truly because of the potential of datacenters in space. I was unable to convince him that the logistics of this would be a nightmare and that this was just a way to make the Twitter buyout SpaceX's problem.
Are there actually people who think this is a good idea that are not in a position to make money off it?
Yes. All the retail investors in SpaceX that will be left to hold the bag.
That's a funny way to spell "our 401k"s.
If it helps, you're VTSAX 401k right now would only lose about 0.1% value if SpaceX dropped to $0. By June 2027 when all insider shares are unlocked it could go as high as 1.5%, but again only if it went to $0.
I hate Musk, I think SpaceX as an IPO was trash, and I disagree with the rule changes for index inclusion. But big picture, our 401k will be fine.
My aunt and uncle are Elon fans (yes, even after his fucking Nazi salute) and have said orbital data centers are a good idea.
They have money, and my uncle is usually pretty smart, so I'm not sure what the fuck is happening.
I know what’s happening! Your aunt and uncle are racist dumbasses.
I don't know you, and I certainly don't know your aunt and uncle, but I would generally assume in Nazi situations that "even after" probably means "particularly after" even if they don't admit it.
It's technically possible that all the starlink satellites have some arm socs. But the case only makes economic sense if the demand for compute outstrips zoning permit for data centers.
Are we talking about a vacuum of copper or a vacuum of feathers
No you’re just confident despite your ignorance. Turning waste heat into electromagnetic radiation is not easy or efficient - 100 to 350W per square meter in current space craft. The sheer scale of radiators necessary in a orbital data centre would dwarf the footprint of the servers themselves.
Perhaps you can educate us instead of being mad at the world?
Thanks but I'd like to not read Billy Madison's lecture on thermal dynamics based on magic and fairy dust.
I don't know if you realize this but losing heat by radiating it away is incredibly slow and inefficient.
It does matter because it means it's not a solution.
Never said it was. But if you want a solution NASA figured it out almost 3 quarters of a century ago. If the cooling solution is the thread that makes or breaks the concept sure you could justify being this irrational I guess or you could find the next better reason to be against data centers in space. Upto you.
You just need something like ~256,000 m² or like 60% the size of vatican city of radiators to dissipate 1mw power at 300k, I calculated it https://crazypeople.online/post/20952535/9448375
You sound like you think you're making a point but you're kinda just saying nonsense in the face of this not being viable.
Man, you can't be this pedantic and this incorrect, all at the same time.
The "there is no air in space therefore datacenters in space are a bad idea" crew is not going away. Are you even human?
We got Musk fanboys on Lemmy before GTA 6.
You don’t understand how heat dissipation works.
When i did i say anything of that? Are you ok buddy?
Check how many square meters of copper radiators per human you need on ISS and then do the math kwh for a datacenter and you will get more tonnes of material than any material on the hole planet earth and now you understand why it's your idea that's removed from any intelligent discourse.
Or why would I bother educating you. Go and invest in companies building data centers in space, vote for them, idc
Black body radiation is a real, but it's an extremely inefficient way to get rid of excess heat. So you'd need huge radiators to get enough surface area.
Add to this the fact that terrestrial data centers operate at a loss, and there's no way to run a space based one profitably.
plus trying to dissipate heat in space, which is mostly a vacumn is a problem too.
"Black body radiation" is the physical process by which you "dissipate" (the correct word here is "radiate") heat in space.
In space you can't just have the heat be passed from the radiator to some "substance" that fills space (like on Earth the heat is passed to air or to water that then gets released to the environment) because almost all of space is empty of matter (not exactly: there's incredibly low density stuff in it, mainly ions, but such low density means pretty much no available mass to sink the heat), so the only way for that heat to leave is the natural physical process of a warm body emitting photons merely because of its temperature (the wavelength of which depends on temperature) which is called Black Body Radiation.
As others have pointed out, it's a way less efficient process that dissipating heat by it being passed from the radiator directly to some substance that's part of the environment (i.e. transmission).
Please reconsider your use of the "R" word. It is not harmless. People try to say "it just means stupid" but we all know what people that word refers to. They also know this word, and know it's used in reference to them.
They don't deserve it. My wife, for example, used to teach Shakespeare in theatrical classes in the adult day school she worked at. Her student absolutely were capable of learning that and understanding it fully.
Yeah, language evolves over time. But just as I hope you wouldn't call a Black person "colored" because that term is currently not appreciated (even though it was the preferred in decades past), I hope you would consider removing the "R" word from your vocabulary as well.
They're arguing in favor of AI. They already don't care about other people, unfortunately.
The "good idea" isn't the data centers but the stock pumping. You propose something insanely difficult and expensive (also hopelessly impractical and stupid in this case) and because it is so difficult and expensive you claim you can monopolize the market if you succeed which is the ultimate dream of every capitalist but you just need some insane amount of investment to get there. Then when the money runs out you go back and ask for more and exploit sunk cost fallacy. All the while valuations increasing. It is an amazing way for already rich scammers to get much, much richer than could happen in a sane economy and slurp up huge amounts of capital that otherwise could have gone into more productive endeavors.
Obviously in any well regulated economic system this shit would be subject to some proper oversight to protect the interests of the majority, particularly all the people whose pensions and livelihoods are at risk when this all goes to shit.
They want to put them where normal people cannot damage them.
It's so expensive. Putting data centers in bunkers or caves is more reasonable. (There actually are data centers like this).
Proton's primary servers are stuffed in a cold war bunker in the Alps, for example.
Is it still like that?
And yet the IPO of SpaceX was justified with the presumed future success of its space-based data center program.
Wait is that really a thing
Yes. He unironically promised to build data centers in space. So basically, his company's stock went up, because he falsely advertised something that is practically impossible to achieve at this time.
Hasn't he said full whee drive automatically driving your car would be availbe a decade ago and it's still not here
Yes. That's not even the most flagrant one
The one I heard was a fleet of Tesla self-driving taxis across the US by 2025.
Instead we have news reports of Teslas on autopilot killing people while the driver is distracted.
There are entire websites dedicated to tracking his "promises" and lies.
Basically, if you believe a word that guy says at this point, you deserve to lose all your money.
It's comical how finance is the most 'vibes' based of any discipline, yet they try so hard to LARP as hard math/science experts. Much projection for such massive insecurity, it seems.
Reagan approves
Shits gonna be like 99% radiator
One consumer grade graphics card surrounded by the largest heatsink ever produced.
"That ought to do the trick!" 😆
Well that's investors fault for believing him isn't it. The biggest thing ever put up in space is the international space station we don't even have the capability to do that anymore. How did they think he was going to build a data centre in orbit? Which of course is completely ignoring all the other technical reasons wouldn't work.
It's like Tesla: Everyone knows it's a scam. Whenever there's a panic or a dip then Musk's army of sock puppets and wash traders will coordinate to purchase more stock and drive the value back up. That's how TSLA has remained so ridiculously over valued for decades.
It's an exponential money printer that's going to break the entire world eventually.
Self landing rockets were practically impossible not that long ago. Self driving cars were practically impossible not that long ago.
There’s nothing fundamentally impossible about orbital data centres. The main factor against it is the $/kg of payload into space. That’s one of the many issues SpaceX is working to solve, and there’s nothing to suggest they won’t get there.
The limiting factor for space data centers is absolutely not the cost to build them. The AI industry has already proven that they will burn the GDP of a small country just to have an LLM that shits out slightly better text that has coin flip level odds of being true.
The limiting factor here is one of thermodynamics. A travel mug for coffee works because it has a near vacuum between the inner lining and the outer shell. Vacuums are fantastic insulation because there’s no atoms there to transfer heat away. Very useful if you want hot coffee for a few hours. Space is a big vacuum, and data centers are giant heat generators. You’re basically putting a computer in a perfect insulation medium. It’s really stupid.
Came here to say this, thanks.
There have been many, many articles about how the only limiting factor left is cost. Thermal radiation is a thing.
Technically, they still are.
There have been implementations of a sell-driving vehicle since the 1980s, and we're still far away from "true" full self diving.
Both of these examples demonstrate the adage of "the first 90% of the work takes 10% of the effort, and the last 10% work takes 90% of the effort".
Oh my lord no. Although, technically yes but not for the reason you think.
The number one issue is heat dissipation. To radiate the heat from one DC satellite (at the power levels needed to run AI workloads) would need a football sized dissipation array. Even if Space X can invent some magical new physics and cut that down to a quarter of that size (hint: they can't), we're still talking about an order of magnitude increase in payload per satellite.
Next on the list is volume. We're currently at around 14k man-made objects in low earth orbit. As it is, satellites (including the ISS) have to perform collision avoidance maneuvers every so often. The calculated limit of satellites we can put up to low earth orbit before orbital collision maneuvers start to become unmanageable is 100k. Basically after that amount we enter into a state where several corrections for each satellite are made regularly, and a single collision at the 100k limit would result in a cascading series of collisions that will render low earth orbit impossible to use. Basically after that anything you put up will get shredded by the insane amounts of debris.
Space X wants to put up a MILLION massive satellites that will require extremely large structures to dissipate the heat from the very power hungry AI chips.
They fully know the impossibility, and when challenged about the over crowding issue during an interview, an engineer brushed it off as "it's not a problem". People who speak that way about science and engineering issues are not serious people.
There are countless engineering and physics reasons why they won't. Stop sniffing Elon's farts. They're not good for your brain.
Edit: all of this is to say: space datacentres are the dumbest idea yet to come out of that idiots face hole. And he's said a lot of really really dumb things.
I suspect Musk is trying to ensure his satellites are up before anyone else's, so when the inevitable legislation is enacted to control who launches what, he already "owns" the lion's share of "orbital real estate".
They're not going to put up these satellites, because they won't be close to usable or affordable. Either the workloads will be miniscule, or the cost to put them into orbit is prohibitive.
The whole pitch was a cool sounding "space age" solution to a problem with AI datacentres that everyone is aware of. It was just a snakeoil salesman's promise just so he could con investors out of money for his sweet 1.7 trillion.
So like you said, I’m correct. The only issue with thermal radiation is $/kg of payload. Again, this is an issue that they’re working to solve via methods like reusable rockets.
That's not what you said. You implied the only limiting factor is a reasonable payload that can be resolved by the current incremental improvements to rocket tech.
What I said is that even with massive improvements to rocket tech, it will still be a near impossibility to get as many AI (or even regular datacentre) satellites into space.
The other issue is that the thermal dissipation problem is not solved for such a large amount of heat in space. It's quite hard to dump large amounts of heat in space, and it needs to be done rapidly with computing. And the larger you make your dissipators the more you run into "how do I move that heat from the source and out towards the edge of the dissipators?" Because you need to utilize ALL of the dissipator if you want to keep your server parts cool. But moving that heat around a massive array is not trivial. If you're using a fluid and moving it with pumps, then now your adding even more heat with the pumps.
And then there's the issue with long term investment. These server components are going to be obsolete in a few years (and nevermind failures). And IIRC, they have plans to regularly de-orbit these things every number of years, which means even more launches at a regular basis to keep the swarm numbers constant.
And none of that matters in the face of the low earth orbit crowding issue that IS a massive problem.
Completely different level of difficulty.
And be pedantic self-driving cars are not a solved problem. If you try driving a Tesla in autopilot and don't intervene when it makes mistakes you'll be in a wall within about 2 minutes.
Building data centres in space isn't just a technical problem, although it's a major technical problem, it's also an economic problem. Obviously yes it's physically possible to do it but there's no way of building a data centre in space for anything close to the price of just doing it on earth and with no other obvious advantage to it being in space there's no reason to do it.
It's the same reason we don't build a transatlantic railroad tunnel. Obviously it's technically possible it's just a very long tunnel, but it would be hella expensive.
So like I said, the only problem is payload cost……
Free unlimited power is the benefit…..
Right so go build a space elevator because little old Elon is not going to fix that no matter what he tells you. Even if you could get starship working you need something with 100 times the lift capacity.
Elon Musks companies have done so many things that people like you said he couldn’t do lol. You’re so blinded by irrational hate for someone who doesn’t even know you exist.
Other people have already explained the topic in sufficient detail, so I'll just leave a quote from a former NASA engineer and a link to their article.
Source: Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea.
It all comes down to $/kg of payload. There’s infinite space up there.
How is this a rational argument? With infinite money we could put the Empire State building on Venus but it would be really fucking stupid.
It’s rational because the payload cost is coming down and down and down with SpaceX. Reusable rockets was a massive step.
Once it’s affordable, why wouldn’t they do it?
Could you imagine being in orbit during an AI datacenter kessler collapse, and just getting smoked by an rtx 5070 travelling at mach fuck?
There'd be nothing less than gold plated B300s in a space datacenter. If they're spending billions flying it up there, they're not going to be putting mid-range consumer GPUs in there. The gold plating probably doesn't even do anything for radiation shielding, the AI just told them to add it to help prop up the AI bubble.
The goal is that its single digits millions to fly it up there. In practice, it'll be 10s of millions to start.
No credit for partial answers, maggot. This is an RTX 5070 Ti with 16G of GDDR7. It was shot out of a grok datacenter in heliosynchronous orbit at 1.3% the speed of light. You know what that means? That means Kevin O'Leary is the most dangerous son of a bitch in space.
Grain of sand...
Does that moniker apply to the ones who support or criticize it?
LOL LOL you CANNOT cool something like that in space. The entire concept is flawed.
You can, they just have to be smaller rather than a massive single orbital data centrer like this proposal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlQYU3m1e80
Still not a great idea because of the economics, but the same can be said for the data center build out on earth too, so why would they let that stop them?
For scale. roughly a two server datacenter needs to have solar and radiator about as big as the ISS.
Which is possible, but insane. However insane plain old datacenter is, just tons more insane.
That simply isn’t true, the video I linked explains everything clearly, for a 20kw satellite the cooling area is needed very modest.
Still not a great idea and I am not advocating for it, but people need to stop fighting bullshit with bullshit and start fighting it with truth.
For reference, a GB300 server is now at about 8.5kw for a single server. A fully populated NVL8 server is about 15kw. Looking online, looks like the ISS is about up to 90kw, so I guess I'm off and the actual number is something like 6 to 10 of these servers per ISS scale facility.
I would still argue this is a crazy overhead for what they would now consider meager capacity, with, luckily for nVidia, a pretty hard deadline where the very expensive equipment burns up without potential for extended lifetime use.
For a single satellite, we'd need a football sized array for heat dissipation. The dissipation capacity isn't equal across the entire array. And you need some way to move the heat from the centre out towards the edges.
And aside from that, 100k satellites is the limit of objects we can put into low earth orbit before we start risking cascade collisions that break everything into small bits and make getting anything into orbit impossible. We're currently at 14k objects. Space X is proposing ONE MILLION satellites. And they'll each need huge heat dissipation arrays.
That simply isn't true, the video I linked explains everything clearly, for a 20kw satellite the cooling area is needed very modest.
Still not a great idea and I am not advocating for it, but people need to stop fighting bullshit with bullshit and start fighting it with truth.
I know who Scott Manley is. I'm subbed to his channel and saw that video when it came out.
That being said, one of the top comments in that video is someone who, claims to be, a spacecraft thermal engineer. And they bring up a few good points. But the one I'm most interested in is the loss of efficiency in heat dissipation the further the heat is pushed along the array. Which means you can't treat the entire surface area of the dissipation array at equal performance, so you need an even bigger array.
And btw, a 20kw satellite is peanuts for AI workloads. Which is the reason they're suggesting putting up a million of these. And that right there is, IMO, the biggest issue. We're already at 14k satellites (most of those are Star Link). And 100k satellites is the current figure we expect collisions between satellites to start becoming unavoidable, with the possibility of an out of control cascade of collision becoming a major concern from there upwards.
I think Kyle Hill did a better job at being objective on the problem:
https://www.youtube.com/live/4mx9Rp-SMNk
A 20KW data center is utterly feeble, barely worth the name, by ground-based data center standards, which easily go into tens of megawatts.
It's a single rack rather than it being a whole data center. The whole constellation of satellites is the data center.
Again, I'm not advocating for this as a good idea, just saying that cooling is not the reason it is a bad one.
It's such a hilariously dumb idea I hope the tech bros sink millions into it.
Lets make a data center we can't maintain, upgrade or access for any practical reason. Waiting for the suggestions to put them in geostationary orbits so that way their latency is even higher but going to struggle staying powered when in Earth's shadow. Or get put in the Earth-Sun L1 so they always have solar power but now have to have significant more radiators on top of even MORE latency beyond beyond the moon's orbit.
For the cost of one orbital data centre, you could probably build 10 terrestrial data centres, bribe literally everyone involved in the construction to pretend that they built it in space, buy an island, fake your death, and spend the rest of your life off-grid.
as much as underwater datacenter, extremely high cost despite the ocean being able to cooldown datacenters fast. also these large LLM have never overcome one major flaw, There is no profit generation in the industry.
That's because we're in relatively early R&D and are trying to speedrun things in a way we generally don't with most tech. To compare to tech you understand and are familiar with, where we're at currently would be equivalent to like the internet in the late 80s/early 90s, except we've all seen how that went and everyone wants to be the Amazon, Microsoft or Google of the AI market when it moves from high R&D and little to no profit to becoming a mainstream part of everyday life.
That transition point will probably be when bipedal robots that can do most tasks as well as a human while running a local model get cheap enough to be sold as industrial equipment. It's why Asian labs (especially Chinese ones) keep showing off bipedal robots doing tasks that require either significant agility or fine motor skills involving predicting where body parts are (like doing needlepoint without being able to see it's hands or doing dance routines).
If you sell rockets and satellites, then data centers in space sound like a perfect idea to increase demand with other people's money.
the pickaxes of this new gold rush.
Orbital politicians, and billionaires are a hella cool idea though
Which planet would they be orbiting?
The doom planet.
Saturn, they'd fit right in with all the other frozen orbital bodies in the ring.
Earth, we're planning on doing an orbital bombardment of politicians, we just have to get enough of them up there.
And not tell them there's no re-entry vehicle
Rods from God, but made of meat
If you are lucky, not uranus
Planet Hell
Eliminating heat is like one of the hardest space problems 🦙
Not just experts but an 11-year-old with a mild interest in space could have explained to these techbros why this wouldn't work as an idea.
Even if it could be made to "work", the idea that it would somehow be superior to or more economical than a terrestrial facility is madness.
It would make sense if there's no space left on earth to build new datacenters, but the simple solution to that is just to stop building so many datacenters.
Basically they're trying to build a data centre where the most expensive part of the data centre is the building itself which is completely not how it's supposed to work.
If and only if someone is insane enough to develop off-planet manufacturing with the bulk of the raw materials originating from somewhere in deep space, e.g. asteroid mining, putting data centers in space might be useful for problems that demand intensive compute and can work with extreme latency.
Then again that's like saying inventing the airplane would have been a good strategy for Neanderthals to find better firewood.
I've been working on IT for quite a while now and the only certain thing on this business is that hardware breaks down. All of it. Only questions are 'when' and 'how'. I'm pretty sure you can't get NBD support to the orbit. And I'd guess that shaking the shit out of the hardware during launch won't really help.
And that's of course just a minor detail, the whole idea is so stupid on a very fundamental level that I don't know why it's even a news worthy.
Lots of radiation in space. Computers classically do not do well with radiation.
Or with waste heat-- a different kind of radiation problem
They'll just get AI to design hard drives that don't fail and chips that are immune to cosmic rays, duh.
My god it's genius, why hasn't Elon Musk thought of this? Is he stupid? (Yes, but not for this)
It makes sense if we have a space elevator and also invert the way most of the physics of data centers work.
The advantage of datacenters in space is that the peasants can't break in and sabotage your equipment. Only a very small set of nations would have the capability of blowing it up or somehow jamming its communications.
It literally only makes sense if you're a billionaire worried about the growing unpopularity of your AI datacenters, or you're using it for war and don't want it easily bombed...
If that's your criteria, put servers in containers and sink them in the ocean. Bonus, no cooling problems.
Yes. And I need to watch Elisium again.
But why not some remote desert?
Or the open ocean, floating on the water? That's literally outside any jurisdiction, and mostly outside the peasants' reach.
I just saw some in China using ocean water for cooling. I think they were underwater?
I seem to recall like 10 or 15 years ago, someone from Google was trying to put a datacenter on a large ship, like a cargo ship or something. Then the story disappeared.
Yeah they did. Microsoft has tried underwater datacenters too.
And theres tons of alternative cooling techniques. The only reason evaporators are being used is because they are the absolute quickest and cheapest to set up, en masse. They don't care about efficiency, leadership is just feeling FOMO and wants the datacenters up yesterday.
The CCC would like a word with you
Seems to me that maintenance would be significant.
They're utterly impracticable. Things cool very slowly in the vacuum of space.
Maybe but also maybe they would hire my uncle and then he could go to space which would be pretty cool.
It's easier to teach data centre engineers to be astronauts than teach astronauts to plug in a SATA drive
"AH DON' WANNA MISS A THIIING..."
I skimmed the title for a sec and thought "what's wrong with orbital stations?" before realizing the utter stupidity that graced my vision.
SpaceX IPO happened to keep xAi afloat.
Servers in space topic exist because of this very reason.
It is a non subject
Or they are just ignorant of how heat dissipation and vacuums work.
Sadly the latency involved in transmitting and receiving from orbit makes many terrestrial applications fail... The speed of light is a fixed constant.
When gaming, we can always see the idiots running on starlink...the lag is visible and makes them sitting ducks.. ;-)
And Starlink satellites are small and in Low Earth Orbit, already inside (the very top of) the atmosphere so they have to use fuel to stay in place and de-orbit naturally when they run out of fuel purely because of atmospheric drag, so they last 5 - 10 years up there and then have to be replaced.
A whole data center would be much larger and replacing one every 5-10 years would be insane, meaning they would actually be higher up all the way out from even the thinnest part of the atmosphere, more distant from the surface hence with more latency.
Just billionaire psychosis like where ai got to where it is to begin with. Obviously they’re all visionaries leading the world to a better place…
Ignoring all of the disadvantages of datacenters in space, what are any of the advantages?
Harder to burn down in a civil uprising, space is neat, and able to ignore laws and regulations because cops are too dumb for space.
Shit-tons of profit, if you happen to own a company that specializes in rocket launches.
Potentially greater power collection for use since solar arrays dont need to be built with the same space and enviromental constraints.
Potentially already in the data path for a lot of communications with satilites being capable of both last mile and backhaul communication.
Archtecture could take advantage of all three dimensions better again because of the extra space and different enviromental constraints (the big one being gravity). This is truer the more of it could be consteucted in microgravity.
Physical security. Its pretty hard for someone to sneak in.
Further failure domain segmentaion. I.e. hurricanes, earth quakes, etc not saying space is safe (good God not saying that!) but if you have a DC in florida, California, and above the earths mesosphere the likely hood that a disaster effects all three is pretty slim.
Closer data transit for interplantery or lunar communication.
Ignoring the costs and new hurdles of the enviroment this is what im tracking.
If we add unstable governments or government interference to that list of possible disasters, it starts to make a little sense.
Harder for desperate people to damage.
The light and noise pollution no one wants near them are offloaded to space?
Astronomers: Am I a joke to you?
Non-astronomers: What are you gonna do about it? Nerd!
If they build a data center on land and an identical one floating on the ocean, what is the difference in how much heat they emit when I throw thermite grenades at them?
At least their water consumption would do down. Let's do it, shoot the tech bros up there with them. Let's even overshoot the orbit and make them disappear in the darkness.
Water consumption has been way overblown. Sure if you're in the Colorado River basin, water is absolutely an issue. But if your concerned with wasted water usage, all data centers combined would be a rounding error compared to what we throw away on turf grass.
Kyle Hill and Hank Green have both made videos about this I'm not crazy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wx7ToT0G0qo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc
I'll watch these after work, but surely the problem is not availability of water, but drinking water, which is another story? Data centers aim for clean water sources which can be used for drinking. Turf grass don't need that which makes the comparison seem unfair
I live in California and am required to water a lawn as a renter with my drinking water. Turf grass may not need drinking water, but I'd guess the portion of water used for grass that is recycled is not particularly high.
You may also be surprised about what makes water "drinking water". There's a water project in San Diego that is aiming to close the water loop by purifying all wastewater using RO and UV, to the point that it is lab-quality pure water. It's illegal to add minerals to it and pump it into the municipal water supply. They have to discharge it into a river first and let it have a certain "residence time" in an open air reservoir. The water we drink here isn't much more than lake water, and far less clean than the water that can be made by recycling wastewater.
It just depends on the location.
Some areas have water shortages where resources are already strained and other areas have abundant water so that no amount of usage will make a dent.
It not that it isn't a problem at all, it's just it is only a problem in specific places and not an inherent issue with datacenters everywhere. Building datacenters in a desert would cause water issues, building them near the great lakes wouldn't impact water availability in the slightest.
They do prefer drinking water, because it's already treated and so the equipment/maintenance to use it is lower and they can just evaporate it away. In other areas, or if required by legislation, they could run coolant to the machines and then cool the coolant using dirtier sources (including seawater).
That doesn’t justify wasting more water.
No let’s not do that. Building these slopstations will only contribute to the build up of space debris. Making it harder for future generations to have access to the stars. Just shoot them into a mountain side, or the ocean floor instead. Far more economical too.
We can "accidentally" explode them on the launch pad as well. I don't really care.
Could even make it easier, cheaper and avoid the ecological disaster as well
don't need to think much about this crackpot idea.
where would the heat dissipate? that just ends this topic.
A data center in space would be damn near impossible to cool.
What's sad is that Stanley did a remarkable job of putting a vacuum flask in the literal hands of millions of Americans. It shouldn't be hard at all for everyone to figure out why this is the case, but here we are.
At medium earth orbit the minimum delay will be about 67ms (250 ms to 600+ ms for geostationary orbits) for LEO it is 25-50 ms. The average ground network ping on a good day is 1ms-20ms.
The article you posted from Futurism(Via Yahoo News) reference a YouTube video as it's source which is in itself is a follow up to IEEE Spectrum article.
I believe watching the original video or reading the actual article will provide a better value.
Do we have a way to transfer heat into rock, because I'm thinking lunar data centers.
I’m far more concerned with the suggested floating datacenters. Just dumping more waste heat into the ocean. WCGW.
Imagine launching that scale of infrastructure, loaded full of Nvidia chips that'll be outdated in like 2 years.
At minimum how would the heat be managed? Also as someone else said, just getting the material from the earth into orbit is currently possible but why?
I think they're a great idea. They don't use land, don't continuously use water, and don't pollute our land and waterways. And, as an added bonus, they're extremely expensive and a money-pit.
Very useless and expensive idea.
Even putting aside the absurd expense, impossible power demand, lack of cooling and abundance of hostile radiation, what the fuck is even the point of a data centre in orbit? "Sorry, I can't access my files right now, the data centre is over the Indian Ocean". "Yeah, I've sent the email - it'll be delivered in fourty-three hours when the satellite is next in range of London". Yes, I'm being facetious but what possible benefit could there be for having ten thousand tiny, low-power data centres - of which you can only access one or two at a time - versus the obvious, existing, cheaper, proven alternative?
As far as I know, there are no more orbital deadzones. We've got so many satellites, if not Starlink, I'm sure some other satellites could do the job of relaying to ground stations. We get live video of boosters landing in the middle of the ocean after all.
I didn't read the article, I'm not AI, but isn't this the point? It's a ridiculous idea and to believe it...
It's SpaceX. Of course they'll say all communication goes through Starlink.
But so far the only use for data centers in space is to already run processing on satellite data and space based telescopes to just send the results back to Earth instead of raw data. And in future perhaps robotics in space that need processing help.
In the investor presentations, its mostly:
Increased solar flux.
Outside any jurisdiction.
That's technically true.
And I assume they'd either be in geosync orbit, networked to each other in LEO like Starlink, or maybe just "training nodes" that don't need constant ground comms.
...Of course, what they leave out is the infeasibility.
The "outside any juristiction" part is probably the main reason here.
Try to seize any evidence from servers that are traveling in space 10000 miles/hour. For now also space weapons are mostly in experimental phase, and I assume would cause a lot of debris in orbit. It makes the thousands of satellites in orbit almost untouchable by any government on earth.
The epstein-class has much to benefit from this.
It might also be playing into the distopyan fantasy of putting a superintelligent AI in earth orbit, so that it becomes unstoppable from earth.
In any case nothing good comes out of this.
They solve a couple issues but introduce a host of others.
If you focus on the couple issues solved, you're obviously biased.
I think its a great idea. A bunch of these tech billionaires should go up on the SpaceGate Titan to survey their plots!
Like with Starlink, it's all about orbital dominance.
If Starcloud is about data storage out reach of terrestrial events (attacks and desasters), then it's irrelevant whether the performance can compete with terrestrial systems. In fact the paper neither mentions flops or bytes.
Looking at starlink, it must be possible to run at least some computational power in space.
The biggest issue is heat dissapation. A satellite that relays a signal requires orders of magnitude less compute power than an AI datacenter.
Well, they mention AI in the title. It's a startup. Of course they do.
Incredibly bad, too lenghty, mostly irrelevant criticisms of the fraud of space datacenters, followed up by the Skynet military justification of being unable to unplug skynet.
Space datacenters from SpaceX are a fraud because they have a 5 year lifecycle with deorbiting of entire unit. The costs compared to 30 year lifecycle of terrestrial solar/battery powered datacenter energy is thus 6x higher (costs of shell/shield, solar, radiators is about the same but 6 replacements). Terrestrial building costs are $20/watt. SpaceX ambitions are to get $30m/launch costs. To be only 2x the terrestrial costs, launch costs need to be $1m (just the fuel costs) with deorbit being to fly off into space instead of a salvage trip.
At 12x the costs, the competitive GPU rental hurdle has to be 12x more expensive than earth. Only military skynet applications would pay for this, and specifically, only permit mechahitler to decide if skynet is doing a good job.
Well there's a headline that's going to have a lot of sane comments under it.
Space Nuttery is a mental illness.
Is this before or after we colonize mars?
Why don't you want to launch the equivalent of a data center in low earth orbit satellites just to have them rain back down every decade or so?
That or they read Neuromancer and came away with all the wrong lessons in their head.
There recently was a report on Channel 4 about an American Bitcoin psycho gathering in Vegas where people framed the tech as unter interplanetary payment system. Someone explain them bandwidth please.
We could be launching solar panels into space that beam down radiation to make power more plentiful and cheap, but nah we but a complex data center that needs maintenance and complex parts
VCs are so dumb and insane they deserve whatever happens to them. Data centers in space...sure...go for it...prove the naysayers wrong.
Or the need to pump a stock to rubes
At this point, just build the data centers on another planet or on another moon
Those only solve for gravity, or not having to pay for fuel to keep things in orbit. Other heavenly bodies are further away, so latency becomes a big problem, followed by exponentially more power to transmit (radio) in order to maintain the same bandwidth. That and cooling: the possible candidates range from as bad as orbit to worse and much worse, all with increasing latency and power needs to boot.
Overall, even the in-orbit version is a bad idea.
Argue? It's a physics problem that has no solution.
How far can this bubble possibly stretch?
That is a huge amount of resources and money just to generate fake videos and porn.
Just nuke it. Bonus is that will interfere with electronics on all satellites in range too
God almighty
Gravity doesn't turn off but those data centers will
When you have a trillion dollars the solar system is your playground.
well atleast its not draining like 3 oceans and half of the power grid right?
Damn, what's the movie name again? With Tom Cruise cloned and all?
Edit: It was oblivion
Huh
Anyone who thinks it will ever happen is equally silly. Space is a dead end, but because of decades of sci-fi people think Star Trek is real.
Diagnosing opposition as mentally ill...
where have i seen that before? hmmm
Social media where 'if you don't agree with me you're a bad person and probably deserve to die' is the standard position for the outrage junkies.
Experts in what? In orbital datacenters? In high risk investments?
Physicists, engineers, etc
"AI psychosis" sounds like a very academic term
I mean, yeah, it is an academic term, it’s a real thing, a lot of research has/is gone/going into it.
The fuck else would you call a psychosis caused by “AI”?