151–160 of 386 posts
Wonder if it's a "speak to the local council" thing, or more a "speak to the local (?) maritime body"?
Why heat the oceans indirectly when you can just place the heatsource directly in them? Much less chance of losing precious ergs. Seriously though, what is the direct ecological impact of doing this at scale, would the local increase in temperature have an immediate effect on the life around it? If so how much of an impact? What about the effect on surface life and life in intermediary layers of the water? After all,…
It takes about 80 watts to heat up a liter of water 1° celsius. Global data centers used about 4.16 x 10^14 watts last year [1]. Let's assume we still have a lot more data centers to build so bump that number up 10,000X. Assuming every watt of energy is actually converted to heat and we moved every data center on earth underwater it'd raise the temperate of the oceans (1.3x 10^21 liters) about 0.01°C. This is a very…
Watt is a measure of power not energy. Did you mean Watt-hour? The specific heat of water is about 4.2 kJ/kg/K. One joule is one watt for one second, that is 1 J = 1 W.s. So one W for one hour (3600 seconds) is 3.6 kJ and is enough to raise the temperature of a kg of water by about 0.9 K
You need to brush up on dimensional analysis :-)
I don't like the idea since raising water temperatures affects life in the ocean like coral reefs.
This has been covered again and again in other comments. Thermal power plants dump heat into oceans today. The data center is much more efficient than a counterpart on land. Ocean life and coral reefs are in danger due to temperature rise as a part of climate change. Energy efficiency helps reduce that temperature rise.
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> Creatures adapt. You're missing half the saying. Creatures adapt, or die. Given the recent articles about how species extermination is accelerating, it's a valid assumption that as many are dying as are adapting. Not to mention, oceanic currents are propelled by heat. Changing that balance (whether by man-made resources or natural sources) could change the currents, which would impact coastal weather patterns. http…
Far more of earth is covered by oceans than by land. Why are these questions more relevant when building an underwater DC than a ground-level one?
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And if it wasn‘t for gravity, everything inside the atmosphere of planets and stars would be rushing to fill that vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum, but that‘s only tempered by the fact that there are more powerful forces than vacuums.
That's not quite right. Even if there were no gravity or other forces, there would be no incentive for matter to go in one direction vs another, regardless of the distribution of matter around it. Over time you'd get a uniform-ish distribution, but that's a question of statistical mechanics, not one of pressure differences. On earth, matter only rushes to fill vacuums because the surrounding air or water pressure pus…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Creatures adapt. You're missing half the saying. Creatures adapt, or die. Given the recent articles about how species extermination is accelerating, it's a valid assumption that as many are dying as are adapting. Not to mention, oceanic currents are propelled by heat. Changing that balance (whether by man-made resources or natural sources) could change the currents, which would impact coastal weather patterns. http…
Far more of earth is covered by oceans than by land. Why are these questions more relevant when building an underwater DC than a ground-level one?
This is adding the ocean as a new layer in the overall heat dissipation stack for datacenter computing; it's impacting a whole new ecosystem that it wasn't before. Thus, we need to be asking these kinds of questions about how this will impact oceanic ecosystems.
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The scale is off. Things that affect local ecosystems are cooling multi-gigawatt nuclear reactors with nearby ocean water, you would be lucky if one of these drew a megawatt of power. That said, the physics are "heat is heat". If you put it into the air or you put it directly into the ocean the only way it leaves the planet is by black body radiation. As a result locally heating some seawater nearby has (on a global…
Sure but one thought experiment is what if we put more of our datacenters underwater? I expect AWS us-east-1 now adds up to over a gigawatt of critical load so if submerged in the ocean off Virginia what would be the effects, and how would those be different from terrestrial datacenters?
Given the mechanics, the overall ratio of heat in the atmosphere vs heat in the oceans is fixed by the Rtheta of the atmosphere/ocean boundary. If the atmosphere gets warmer, more heat is transferred. If the atmosphere is colder less heat is transferred.
The other question (which Jacques alluded too) is what about the local conditions. And here to the thermal mechanics give our underwater data center an advantage. Given the thermal conductivity of water, and seawater in particular, heat dumped into any spot rapidly diffuses to the rest of the ocean. That is not the case with air, which has a much lower thermal conductivity. Dumping lots of heat into unconstrained air locally can cause a localized "hot spot" which creates an interesting thermal plume and localized winds as cooler air around it comes rushing in.
To get a good understanding of just how effective the ocean is at diffusing heat, consider any of the hydrogen bomb tests in the Pacific. Prodigious amounts of heat dumped into the ocean creating a local hot spot (and a lot of steam!) and an undetectable change in overall ocean temperature. Kilauea volcano, same effect.
The ocean has a lot of thermal mass, without something like an asteroid from space, its hard to move the needle on its temperature overall.
[1] There are some pretty interesting thoughts around using harmonic resonators to convert ambient heat into IR radiation at a wavelength that can more easily pass through the atmosphere but those are just lab experiments at the moment AFAIK.
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Far more of earth is covered by oceans than by land. Why are these questions more relevant when building an underwater DC than a ground-level one?
They're not more relevant, but they are equally relevant. This is adding the ocean as a new layer in the overall heat dissipation stack for datacenter computing; it's impacting a whole new ecosystem that it wasn't before. Thus, we need to be asking these kinds of questions about how this will impact oceanic ecosystems.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We need NPT dropped, that’s all it takes I think(given everyone can still be nice after which is a big if)
the "non-proliferation treaty" ?
My personal opinion is that if we discover a more devastating weapon of some sort, such as kinetic bombardment using bunches of O'Neill space colonies as projectiles, nuclear becomes comparatively benign and that kinds of event can lead to more de-regulation.