I am just honestly confused. There seem to be no logical reason for it, except that it would raise the stock value of rocket producers like SpaceX and Blue Origin.
I believe Apartheid Pedo cited space being cold as a reason (ie don’t have to worry about cooling the servers), except as usual he’s a fuckwit with no idea what he’s talking about. Space is empty, which means there’s nothing to carry heat away, so the only way to lose heat is via radiation. And that takes forever.
Yeah I think space stations have to literally worry about not radiating enough heat away. If there is no medium to transfer the heat into the heat can’t really go away. One of the many unintuitive features of space
To the point that they occasionally have to use the solar panels to shade the radiators.
Thermals in space are difficult
We can just terraform space duh
Falcon Heavy with a shitload of ice cubes
No, it seems like you understand it perfectly.
It’s a shameless attempt to loop in their own assets to a free for all money spree. There is literally nothing about it that makes any sense. It would be more efficient to beam laser light back to earth to power a dc than this, and that’s a stupid idea too.
It’s a terribly inneficient idea, but it sounds futuristic, which is basically what Elon trades on to acquire government subsidies and investor buy-in.
Snake oil. As almost everything else.
My theory is that it’s so they are beyond the reach of protesters, the law, etc. I think that is going to be a very in-demand property for servers going forward.
With the money that it costs to send an entire data center to space you can easily fortify and militarize your data center on earth to the extent that no protester will ever come close?
The law is anyway already largely under their control right? They don’t have to go to space to evade the law.
And to the extent that the law still applies to them and constraints then, doesn’t it also still apply to the necessary ground-based necessities for space based data centers? As in, if the state wants to shut them down, they can still do so?
necessary ground-based necessities for space based data centers?
They could be configured such that no off switch exists, no manual administration is required, and it’s a fully self-sovereign system that can only be shut down by sending a missile to space, and physically accessing it to extract the data or encryption keys it contains is even harder.
you can easily fortify and militarize your data center on earth to the extent that no protester will ever come close?
Only if your definition of “protester” excludes anyone using weaponized drones, but that misses the point. The current meta for fortifications right now clearly favors the attackers, and that’s especially going to be true for a facility requiring large power inputs. That meta no longer applies if your data castle is in space.
Shooting down satellites isn’t scifi anymore. Any medium sized country can do it if they want to.
Why don’t they already then? Russia could shoot down satellites providing communications to Ukrainian drones for instance, couldn’t they? I think it is because doing so triggers a large shitstorm and real geopolitical consequences, if it becomes the norm then no one will get to benefit from any satellites, so a smaller and less influential country is not getting off easy if they do that, same kind of deal as nukes and access to them except probably a little less so. The similarity being that there is a cutoff point below which no one has access, and above which heavy coercion and other manipulation can be imposed as an effective deterrent.
Mostly because it’s expensive and some satellites are in way higher orbit than you want to fire randomly at, and hitting just a few satellites is more of a very very expensive annoyance unless you’re doing it to time it with other strikes (and yes there’s also escalation risk, but countries without their own satellites won’t care much)
The tech billiionaires got annoyed by regulations and complaints and are looking for a easier way.
We towed it outside the environment.
Into another environment, no?
Meanwhile China is putting them underwater for passive cooling.
They do? MS tried too, but too much issues with marine life, corrosion and accessibility for repairs/replacement. With the third also being a issue with space, but x100.
Saw this awhile back and kinda rolled my eyes. I see the appeal of the idea, but the execution seems unnecessarily complicated for little gain. The space one is even worse, the sheer amount of fuel to lift that kind of weight is just a stupid waste.
that the water footprint of datacentres could reach 9.3tn litres by 2030 – enough to service the annual domestic water needs of all 1.3 billion residents of sub-Saharan Africa.
And then they wonder about the spike in climate warming, with water vapor being one of the most effective greenhouse gases.
It was an interesting experiment for certain but it’d be easier overall I think to make a desalinization plant to produce more water specifically for the data center to cool with.
Because it sounds like “future” to stupids.
They’re harder for us to burn to the fucking ground if we can’t reach them.
Solar power and low latency laser communications.
Power is free* in space.
Communications between satellites is as fast as fast can be, fast enough that it can be faster to go earth-sat-sat-sat-earth than via fibre under the ocean.
The absolute con is that heat is really really hard to shed in space and it’s really really expensive to get big heavy things to space.
The absolute con is that heat is really really hard to shed in space and it’s really really expensive to get big heavy things to space.
The entire convo in one sentence.
Honestly I feel like a big issue is the physical security. Now your data center is more vulnerable to any orbit capable adversary.
Lasers are no longer low latency when distances are huge
Power may be accessible with solar panels, but power density is shit in space because solar panels force a flat design with limited depth, plus cooling issues, and you eventually need a construction so large that it’s incredibly fragile.
Lasers in space are speed of light in a vacuum which it considerably faster than speed of light in a fibre.
And then promptly loses out to the longer distance between nodes, slower network gear on the satellites themselves, the massive latency loss to requiring more complex higher redundancy signal coding due to the energy loss in the laser across the distance (since it spreads out, vs a fiber maintaining most energy). Even if you used dense LEO satellites like Starlink it remains unreliable and the motion of satellites means you can’t have a stable path length.
Tldr it’s useless for almost everything. You need to be able to not just use efficient live path selection when sending traffic, you have to be able afford to pay for QoS priority on wildly expensive satellites due to all the specifical equipment and hardware capacity limits. If you’re not doing high speed trading arbitrage you can’t make that money back.
Just look at what the experts say in the paper below. Below 3000 km it’s always slower. Starlink doesn’t have the capacity to beat the 3000 km threshold now. USA is something like 4500 km across. The investment alone to beat fiber from coast to coast (the ideal scenario) makes it not worth trying.
If you’re not doing high speed trading arbitrage you can’t make that money back.
Exactly. It is lower latency.
You’re moving the goal posts now to the problem being commercial viability for a subset of activity.
Look at the paper I added. It does lose up to a huge distance because of the uplinks and satellite movement. It takes something ridiculous to get use of space lasers, because otherwise I was completely right, you ADD enough distance to the path for lasers to lose.
And if fiber gets improved further by fibers which slow light less (up from 67% of c) then the threshold distance grows proportionally
You answered half of your own question.
“it would raise the value of rocket producers like SpaceX and Blue Origin.”
The other thing is a complete lack of jurisdiction. At least theoretically, nobody can go after them for generating grossly illegal content in space.
Also, pure hypermasculine fetishism.
Also, pure hypermasculine fetishism.
This is the weirdest take on data centers ever.
but … it checks out?
I feel like “data centers in spaaaaaaaace!” is an idea that could only come from someone completely removed from the day-to-day of how computers actually work. Like no matter how you slice it, these are physical objects that are going to need servicing by human beings fairly regularly. Putting them in space vastly complicates that process.
They can’t build datacenters on earth on time and in budget, it’s totally gunna be easier in orbit
Robots exist. They literally have robots that you can basically sync them to your movements. And you can control them with VR. So somebody on Earth can control a robot and fix that shit from Earth, if truly needed. I really doubt they would have any need for that though.
The plan is use modules just like starlink only they’re going to call them starmind, and the goal is a constellation of over a million of them. They’ll be in relatively low earth orbit and they will have relatively short lives and there will be a cadence to regularly replace them.
I’m sure you’ve seen how Elon likes to piss away money…
As stated elsewhere it’s a scam but their stated reason is because they want to build massive data centres on earth but there’s a huge backlog in getting electricity for them. Even generating their own electricity is troublesome because every single natural gas/methane turbine is already spoken for years into the future and solar etc takes a lot of land which they may have trouble getting the rights to build on. Thus, if you could build in space you can theoretically collect a lot more solar and more strongly than what you get on the planet’s surface. It just ignores all the other costly parts but I guess if you are being given unlimited money by venture capitalists what else are you going to promise them when they want more more more AI infrastructure
So I can actually think of a few reasons: Preprocessing vast amounts of super high resolution satellite imagery to save bandwidth, and jurisdictional black site processing data some countries would want to steal or arrest you for having or processing, particularly if you were hiding it from internal audit. You would be paying an extreme premium over ground based for ever FLOP, so, the customer base of practical customers is limited to a handful of very well funded intelligence agencies or scientific projects in very niche use cases.
Like every other real “ai” use case:
This is fucking awful, and I hope there’s a hell so every single person involved can get some fraction of the suffering they deserve.
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Ding ding!
- It’s not better for cooling. - No air or water to dissipate heat.
- It’s not better for communication. - Beaming data is always more lossy than its physically connected counterpart.
- It’s not less expensive. - Just submerge it, or build closer to the poles with wind and solar to power it
Also, it throws more junk in our orbit, is more difficult to maintain and upgrade, and has a significantly more catastrophic fail result.
But why do things logically or sustainably when you* can make money?
* you = someone who already is hoarding a large portion of our wealth.
But then how do they make money out of it?
By scamming investors and fooling shareholders.
same way musk made a shitton of money with hyperloop: by getting other people to pay for it and then not actually do it.
