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Datacenters in space aren't going to work

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Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#261

Post by gaigalas »

james-bcn wrote: post #257
gaigalas wrote: post #251

You don't need massive datacenters in space. You literally just need to be in space, because no typical laws apply if you are there. That little detail outweights all sorts of costs. So, yeah. There will be datacenters in space. Probably unlike any on the ground. Smaller, very likely not running typical datacenter stuff, weirder, operating on a different set of regulations. If we're lucky, it will be like Antarctica…

>You literally just need to be in space, because no typical laws apply if you are there. That makes no sense. Unless you are going to use the data in space (what for?), you need to import it into a country, and it is at that point the crime will have been committed. You can't, for example, circumvent GDPR laws just by sending the data into space first.

I can see you lack imagination. That's good! It indeed makes no sense, you're right.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#262

Post by thelastgallon »

collinmcnulty wrote: post #197

To say the quiet part out loud, I don't think any serious companies have any intention to build a data center in space. There is no benefit in actually trying this. There is however, benefit in saying you'll do it to advance a narrative and distract from the problems terrestrial data centers are facing to an audience that mostly doesn't understand how heat transfer in a vacuum works.

> There is however, benefit in saying you'll do it to advance a narrative

Its almost as if there is good money to be made promoting bad ideas! Theranos, Wework, Tesla, NFTs, Crypto.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#263

Post by dijit »

cladopa wrote: post #258

It is not a good idea listening to experts tell you what can't be done. Science and technology progresses one funeral at at time. Einstein's ideas were crazy for classical scientists and Heisenberg's for Einstein. The most important thing is making space access ten to one hundred times cheaper with reusable rockets. Then a lot of the problems in the article will not be problems at all. E.g ISS was designed and create…

I always believed thermal conductivity to be one of the hardest problems in space.

Today the way we diffuse temperature is via the air itself, and without air to carry heat away from components we don’t really have very much to work with.

I know space is cold, but diffusing the cold onto the warm is an ongoing problem as far as I understood it.

Which is why for example of nuclear submarines would not bode well in space, the internal temperature would just continue to rise until eventually the thing will become an oven floating through the solar system.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#264

Post by eldenring »

dijit wrote: post #263
cladopa wrote: post #258

It is not a good idea listening to experts tell you what can't be done. Science and technology progresses one funeral at at time. Einstein's ideas were crazy for classical scientists and Heisenberg's for Einstein. The most important thing is making space access ten to one hundred times cheaper with reusable rockets. Then a lot of the problems in the article will not be problems at all. E.g ISS was designed and create…

I always believed thermal conductivity to be one of the hardest problems in space. Today the way we diffuse temperature is via the air itself, and without air to carry heat away from components we don’t really have very much to work with. I know space is cold, but diffusing the cold onto the warm is an ongoing problem as far as I understood it. Which is why for example of nuclear submarines would not bode well in spa…

The comment you were replying to mentioned this. Yes you cant remove heat via convection, but you can use radiators to emit heat as radiation into space.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#265

Post by zbentley »

cladopa wrote: post #258

It is not a good idea listening to experts tell you what can't be done. Science and technology progresses one funeral at at time. Einstein's ideas were crazy for classical scientists and Heisenberg's for Einstein. The most important thing is making space access ten to one hundred times cheaper with reusable rockets. Then a lot of the problems in the article will not be problems at all. E.g ISS was designed and create…

Selection bias.

Science is very very very rarely disrupted by a small group of visionaries in the same way business or technology are.

Substitute “perpetual motion machines” for “datacenters in space”. For very Heisenberg and Einstein there are thousands of crackpots who wasted huge amounts of (often other people’s) money trying to build perpetual motion machines. None of them were remembered.

The overwhelming majority of real scientific advancement is slow, grinding, difficult, incremental, and group-based.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#266

Post by zurfer »

cladopa wrote: post #258

It is not a good idea listening to experts tell you what can't be done. Science and technology progresses one funeral at at time. Einstein's ideas were crazy for classical scientists and Heisenberg's for Einstein. The most important thing is making space access ten to one hundred times cheaper with reusable rockets. Then a lot of the problems in the article will not be problems at all. E.g ISS was designed and create…

I think it's a great article that should discourage a lot of people to waste resources.

To really do it you have to treat this article as a to-do list of challenges to overcome. If you have no ideas on how to address those challenges you should not start.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#267

Post by deno »

gaigalas wrote: post #260
deno wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes no sense. The company will still be on the ground in some country and it has to connect to the Earth internet on the ground in some country. Unless you are talking about actual space pirate station, but in that case it better come equipped with missile defense because it will be attacked sooo fast.

> The company will still be on the ground in some country But the data won't. That is literally how people launder money. They live in one country and keep their money in another with laxed laws and enforcement. Those people get away a lot. > it has to connect to the Earth internet Why? This is only true if the datacenter is directly serving people. As I mentioned previously, I don't believe space datacenters will be…

There are wayyyy easier ways to just get some private calculations. You can spin up an encrypted memory VM or wire up an eager physical kill switch. Launching satellites would bring a lot of attention and requires skills, money, multiple people with access. But I can do the former just fine by myself.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#268

Post by zbentley »

mbesto wrote: post #120

Datacenters in space is about circumventing nation states masked as ambitions to generate more power. Follow the rationale: 1. Nation states ultimately control three key infrastructure pieces required to run data centers (a) land (protected by sovereign armed forces) (b) internet / internet infra (c) electricity. If crypto ever became a legitimate threat, nation states could simply seize any one of or all these three…

Space is the least nation-state-independent place to do computing in existence.

All proposed space computing has an incredibly short orbital lifespan (less than 5y).

Every single space launch capable rocket provider in the world is financially, regulatorily, and militarily joined at the hip to a single government. No launches are taking place without that government’s say-so.

Also, space infrastructure is incredibly vulnerable to attack by nation-states as many others in this thread have pointed out.

EDIT: Removed unnecessary snark and fixed a mistaken double negative (s/dependent/independent) in the first sentence.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#269

Post by thelastgallon »

cladopa wrote: post #258

It is not a good idea listening to experts tell you what can't be done. Science and technology progresses one funeral at at time. Einstein's ideas were crazy for classical scientists and Heisenberg's for Einstein. The most important thing is making space access ten to one hundred times cheaper with reusable rockets. Then a lot of the problems in the article will not be problems at all. E.g ISS was designed and create…

> The most important thing being cheap is that access to the Space become possible for way more people with creativity. Not just a few people with academic titles but people with practical engineering and scientific mastery (that certainly run circles around them on real projects).

Agreed! Real estate is incredibly cheap in space until Saudi money and private equity figure out a way to make it a scarce resource. Also, we can build massive single suburban homes in space! No need to build vertical and public transit. Just give everyone a rocketship to travel to the nearest space McDs drive through!

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#270

Post by Coffeewine »

schiffern wrote: post #228
Animats wrote: post #158

Related" "A City on Mars" (2024) [1] A useful book on why self-sustaining settlements on Luna, Mars, or earth orbit are pretty much hopeless. Remote bases that take a lot of supply, maybe, with great difficulty. The environment is just too hostile and doesn't have essential resources for self-sustaining settlements. The authors go into how Antarctic bases work and how Biosphere II didn't. The worst real estate on Ear…

>"A City on Mars" (2024) I wasn't terribly impressed with this one. I found it mostly just a bundle of vague negativity and insufficient (disingenuous?) use of problem-solving. However if you want to try it then give the rebuttal a fair shake too. https://nss.org/wp-content/uploads/NSS-JOURNAL-Critique-of-A...

I was very interested to see in that rebuttal that they explicitly called out ‘datacenters in space’ as a means of ‘exporting’ solar power to the earth.

> As the Weinersmiths point out, the ease of generating solar electricity in space is foundational to space development. They focus on the challenges in beaming power back to the Earth, but the “power” could be returned to the Earth in other ways, such as by doing energy intensive manufacturing in space, with the result that we do not need the power on the Earth itself. One modern idea that O’Neill did not consider is to move server farms in space, where power is cheap and you can dump heat into space with a black piece of metal. If this was done on a large scale, the carbon impact of data services on the Earth would drop greatly even if power is not beamed back to the Earth. There are almost certainly other ways we can use power in space to do things in space that benefit people on the Earth.

So the original article seems to think that cooling is a significant challenge and that solar power in space is not ‘that much’ more effective than on the earth, and the other that cooling is trivial and that solar power is easily obtained. I’m inclined to go with ‘space is hard’ as that seems to comport with my other readings, but obviously the critique of ‘a city on mars’ is advocating for space exploration and is so motivated to minimize the difficulties.

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