221–230 of 1001 posts
- have very non-deterministic latency
- are located outside of a country that can protect you (ie China could disrupt your space data center)
- have to pay millions of dollars to swap out hardware
I'm convinced that >30% of this comes from ideas leaking out of fiction such as like Neuromancer , and percolating through the minds of wealthy people attracted to some of the concepts. Namely, the dream of being a hyper-wealthy dynasty, above any earthly government, controlling an extraterritorial Las Vegas Fiefdom In Space. (Which in the book, also hosted a powerful AI.) Then they work backwards, trying to figure o…
I wouldn’t credit science fiction for much of this. It appears to have come out of a crack pipe.
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The equation has a ^4 to the temperature. If you raise the temperature of your radiator by ~50 degrees you double its emission capacity. This is well within the range of specialised phase change compressors, aka fancy air conditioning pumps. Next up in the equation is surface emissivity which we’ve got a lot of experience in the automotive sector. And finally surface area, once again, getting quite good here with nan…
> Next up in the equation is surface emissivity which we’ve got a lot of experience in the automotive sector. My car doesn't spend too much time driving in vacuum, does yours?
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Not disagreeing with you at all: that physics fact always come up. My honest question is: if it's a perfect thermos, what does, for example, the ISS do with the heat generated by computers and humans burning calories? The ISS is equipped with a mechanism to radiate excess heat into space? Or is the ISS slowly heating up but it's not a problem?
Massive radiators. In this photo[0], all of the light gray panels are thermal radiators. Note how they are nearly as large as the solar panels, which gives you an idea about the scale needed to radiate away 3-12 people's worth of heat (~1200 watts) + the heat generated by equipment. [0] https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/jsc2021e064215_alt/jsc2...
As a thought experiment, if humanity wanted to go all in on trying to move industrial processes and data centers off planet, would it make more sense to do so on the moon? The moon has: - Some water - Some materials that can be used to manufacture crude things (like heat sinks?) - a ton of area to brute force the heat sink problem - a surface to burry the data centers under to solve the radiation problem - close enou…
Probably a lot easier, but the moon looses a major selling point of data centres in space, namely reasonable latency. To be clear, I don't think it's a good idea. But I think that specifically the way Musk is trying to position it, the moon would be an even harder sell.
I agree. I would be quite a moonshot.
I'm convinced that >30% of this comes from ideas leaking out of fiction such as like Neuromancer , and percolating through the minds of wealthy people attracted to some of the concepts. Namely, the dream of being a hyper-wealthy dynasty, above any earthly government, controlling an extraterritorial Las Vegas Fiefdom In Space. (Which in the book, also hosted a powerful AI.) Then they work backwards, trying to figure o…
That's not fair! Sometimes the ideas come from Snow Crash, which gave us the Metaverse because Zuckerberg wanted to cut a guy in half with a katana from a motorcycle.
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Its very simple, xAI needs money to win the AI race, so best option is to attach to Elon’s moneybank (spacex) to get cash without dilution
> xAI needs money to win the AI race Off on a tangent here but I'd love for anyone to seriously explain how they believe the "AI race" is economically winnable in any meaningful way. Like what is the believed inflection point that changes us from the current situation (where all of the state-of-the-art models are roughly equal if you squint, and the open models are only like one release cycle behind) to one where som…
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Yeah he only micromanages (look at his old blog) every detail he has time for at an extremely successful aerospace engineering company, just an ideas guy.
> Yeah he only micromanages (look at his old blog) every detail he has time for at an extremely successful aerospace engineering company, just an ideas guy. Have you ever spoken to someone who works at SpaceX? I have multiple friends in the industry, who have taken a trip through the company. The overwhelming consensus is that - in meetings, you nod along and tell Elon "great idea". Immediately after you get back to…
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Any country capable of producing nuclear warheads will also be able to toss up enough BBs and other small objects into LEO to wipe out most of Starlink and anything else in LEO. South Africa built nuclear weapons in the 1980s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_and_weapons_of_ma... But it never had an orbital launch capability. Pakistan doesn't have a domestic orbital launch capability but it does have nuclea…
presumably the UK could figure out how to remove the top of a trident missile and replace it with a load of ball bearings
Not that the UK manufactures trident missiles anyway.
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What if instead we moved it all to a closer rock that has even more water, even more materials to manufacture crude (and even advanced) things, even more surface, more protection from radiation, and even crazier still had significantly less launch costs? Almost any reason why the moon is better than in orbit is a point for putting it on earth.
I think there's something to be said about imagining a future where we can keep the earth clean of all the nasty industrial processes we have grown accustomed to living next to. A big part about this proposed idea is that you could do a lot of manufactoring in space. I have long theorized there will be some game changing manufacturing processes that can only be done in a zero gravity environment. EX: - 3d printing hu…