341–350 of 447 posts
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…
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…
I'm as critical as OP on data centers in space, but "A City on Mars" was a really badly researched book, full of errors, that completely misrepresented the would-be Mars settler position. I wouldn't take seriously anyone quoting it unless they've also read, at minimum, "The Case for Mars" as well.
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Not really. Space is too large.
On the contrary, orbital positions are quite limited. And space debris is already a large issue.
Otherwise? Go wild. The space doesn't lack for space.
And with all the LEO megaconstellations? GEO isn't as vital as it once was.
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…
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You can short the publicly traded companies that do this.
No, because to do that and not ruin myself I need to know roughly when the double will burst. Just knowing it is a bubble is not enough.
Myself, I made the decision to go to cash a while ago, right before the recent AI pullback. Things were going great for a week until I started seeing all that money go unclaimed. I get back in, and the pullback I predicted happens. It was my own conscious decision to look past the gorilla in the room to get more free treats. I'll be fine but this is a good anecdote for how these things unfold.
There are 8,000+ Starlink satellites in orbit right now. Each one has about 30 square-meters of solar panels. That's 240,000 square meters. ISS has 25,000 square meters, so SpaceX has already launched almost 10-times the solar panels of ISS. The next generation Starlink (V3) will have 250 square meters of solar panels per satellite, and they are planning on launching about 10,000 of them, so now you're at 2.5 million…
But clearly Starlink is not competitive with widely-available residential Internet access offerings, and nowhere near what is expected of terrestrial data centers. People use Starlink when there are no other good options. In the urban areas where most people live, people use land-based ISPs because they are cheaper and better.
An example, by contrast: Trammell Crow is planning a 12 million square foot data center campus in Georgia that will be infinitely more maintainable and have access to better Internet connections than anything space bound. At $8.4B, it will be significantly less expensive than space bound alternatives.
There are better options than space for data centers, so space data centers are unlikely to be a thing. (Someone will probably do a trial for PR though.)
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…
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I think you’re ignoring a huge factor in how radiative cooling actually works. I thought the initial question was fine if you hadn’t read the article but understand the downvotes due to doubling down. Think of it this way. Why do thermoses have a vacuum sealed chamber between two walls in order to insulate the contents of the bottle? Because a vacuum is a fucking terrible heat convector. Putting your data center into…
Pardon but this doesn't make sense to me. A 1 m^2 radiator in space can eliminate almost a kilowatt of heat. >vacuum is a fucking terrible heat convector Yes we're talking about radiating not convection
Assuming that this is the right order of magnitude, a 8MW datacenter discussed upthread would require ~8000 m^2, plus a fancy way of getting the heat there.
A kilowatt is nothing. The workstation on my desk can sustain 1 kW.
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You can short the publicly traded companies that do this.
The market can, as always, remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, or certainly for longer than _I_ can. Like, come on, you must understand what a stupid response this is? “There is a bubble” is not a sufficient thesis to, well, do much of anything on.