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Starship V3

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Re: Starship V3

#181

Post by Dylan16807 »

piloto_ciego wrote: post #95
spankalee wrote: post #38

[flagged]

Honestly, I think he's spot on, and I normally am not fond of Elon's public behavior. I mentioned in another thread that they're getting around having to ask permission to build datacenters by doing it in space. The entire thing is to avoid NIMBY stuff I'd bet.

You can build a completely self-powered (and water-free) datacenter in the middle of nowhere for far cheaper than the satellite version. The NIMBY factor isn't so powerful as to keep datacenters off entire continents. Going to space for that is very stupid.

Re: Starship V3

#182

Post by femto »

ActorNightly wrote: post #150
AlexErrant wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_stations_in_Antarctic... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanza_Base https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_Las_Estrellas

Permanent means self sustaining. I.e biodome completely isolated from outside with its own atmosphere. None of those are self sustaining.

There's an argument that Earth, as a biodome completely isolated from outside with its own atmosphere, also isn't self sustaining.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day

I'd keep the Moonraker film in mind as a metric for self sustaining colonies created by billionaires. They can't be trusted unless they are also working to fix what we already have.

Re: Starship V3

#183

Post by gpm »

trothamel wrote: post #176
gpm wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's putting AI processing out of the reach of hostile local, state, and international governments It isn't... the hostile local government can seize the ssh keys you use to control it and take it over just fine. The hostile international non-local super power just gained a new ability to jam communications or destroy it with a bit of deniability too.

So, that's generally not something local governments do in the US. They do things like increasing taxes on data centers, denying water rights, electric interconnection rights, etc. (At least, all of this has been threatened against data centers.)

The US government, and sub-governments routinely exercise control over data centres, typically by the simple act of issuing a subpoena or warrant or weird national security document. They will entirely retain this power. And the power to force compliance with force if they need to (though they typically don't).

Local governments in the US practically never exercise control over data centers by doing any of the things you just discussed. There's a reason why you're saying "this has been threatened". It's a strange new thing resulting from bizarre current behavior - behavior and a resulting trend that started after Elon started talking about space based data centers, and thus cannot be the cause of it.

Re: Starship V3

#184

Post by gpm »

trothamel wrote: post #174
rasz wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>hostile ... international governments you mean other than China, russia, NK and Iran?

SpaceX's launch capacity is an order of magnitude larger that all four of those put together.

Which is irrelevant because offensive launches can destroy many orders of magnitude more launches worth of payloads. Even with simple kinetic means. Though these days I think I'd expect to see directed energy weapons adding even more zeros to that.

Re: Starship V3

#185

Post by Dylan16807 »

piloto_ciego wrote: post #135
MattDamonSpace wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends on scale. There will be enough terrestrial vetoes that if what we build is 10-1000x what people are already halting through legal challenges …

I doubt it. Like, I hate to have to be the bearer of bad news, and maybe it’s my weird arctic anarchist soul, but, the old world order, the need for these companies to follow rules at least in spirit? That’s dead now. There are no laws but the laws of physics and the the laws others force your organization to follow. I recognize that that is distressing to people, hell, it’s been obvious to me since I was at OWS in m…

> And if I had to choose, I’d much rather have datacenters in orbit than one burning hydrocarbons loudly 2 blocks from my kids’ school.

Yeah, but that choice is nonsense. Mandate that datacenters on the ground are on 100% green power and quiet, and they'll still be way way more cost effective than the orbital option.

Re: Starship V3

#186

Post by joha4270 »

jatora wrote: post #144
pveierland wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beyond aggressively optimistic timelines, I find it difficult to disagree with the premise. The aggressively optimistic timelines is also what makes it feasible to even attempt these things, where e.g. the amount of iteration required for Starship would have broken most other companies. > In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale. In the long term - all mass and energy available is outside o…

biosphere interference from ground infrastructure? any idea the ground infrastructure it requires to support space based compute operations? i have a feeling that is comparable if not more impactful you also shrug off cooling. this is not a solved problem in any way. its not even approachable as of yet. the vast size of the radiators will be hilarious regardless. you ignore power generation. solar is not an option. s…

Your feelings are obviously your own, but a Starlink terminal isn't that big and can transfer quite a lot of tokens.

Every single satellite has sufficient cooling for its power production, otherwise they would be frying. Waste heat from a GPU is not materially different from waste heat from an amplifier. That's not cooling entire racks, but I don't think anybody talks about putting entire racks in space anymore.

I'm very much pro nuclear, but a solar cell in a sun synchronous orbit is pretty great too and eliminates most battery requirements

I very much doubt the economics of this makes sense, but I don't think a lot of your criticism is valid.

Re: Starship V3

#187

Post by 7e »

V3... the third major redesign, and the second unplanned one. How many verisons will it take? Will Starship beat Full Self Driving into production, or will the hyperloop steal the show? Will it take longer than the Tesla Semi (9 years and counting) or will it pull a Tesla Roadster and never launch at all? Either way, it's sorely needed to meet Musk's goal of landing on Mars by 2018. Or at least to get to zero new cases by the end of April.

Re: Starship V3

#188

Post by drivingmenuts »

spankalee wrote: post #38

[flagged]

Pretty normal for Elon: big promises, generate interest and funding, then fail to deliver. But by that time, he’s got his trillion-dollar paycheck and is working on his next scheme.

We used to eliminate Nazis, not invest in them.

Re: Starship V3

#189

Post by fulafel »

ryzvonusef wrote: post #165
spankalee wrote: post #38

[flagged]

> Yes, Elon is very sane. tbf, a 'sane' person wouldn't have started a rocket company and an ev company, at the same time, in a recession. He has never been sane. and that has made all the difference.

Tesla and SpaceX were both founded outside of recessions about 1 year apart, between the early 2000's recession and the great recession.

Re: Starship V3

#190

Post by kelnos »

piloto_ciego wrote: post #95
spankalee wrote: post #38

[flagged]

Honestly, I think he's spot on, and I normally am not fond of Elon's public behavior. I mentioned in another thread that they're getting around having to ask permission to build datacenters by doing it in space. The entire thing is to avoid NIMBY stuff I'd bet.

It would be orders of magnitude cheaper to buy up islands and space in countries that don't care, and then find ways to connect them to the required infrastructure, than it would be to build them in space.

Hell, it would be cheaper to figure out how to build them on the ocean.

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