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Data centers in space makes no sense

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Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#671

Post by sixQuarks »

TheDong wrote: post #410
elamje wrote: post #353

I was talking to someone about this the other day. I was part of a team at NASA that developed a cooling system for the ISS and this whole premise makes no sense to me. 1. Getting things to space is incredibly expensive 2. Ingress/egress are almost always a major bottleneck - how is bandwidth cheaper in space? 3. Chips must be “Rad-hard” - that is do more error correcting from ionizing radiation - there were entire t…

> Would love for someone to make the case for why it actually makes total sense, because it’s really hard to see for me! Elon musk has a history of making improbable-sounding promises (buy a tesla now, by 2018 it will be a self-driving robotaxi earning money while you sleep, humanoid robots, hyperloops). The majority of these promises have sounded cool enough to enough people that the stock associated with him (TSLA)…

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Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#673

Post by sixQuarks »

rockemsockem wrote: post #487
adastra22 wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The story here is even simpler. SpaceX is going public this year. Elon made a monumentally shitty investment in Twitter and then poured a stupid amount of money into xAI at the peak of the cycle. By having SpaceX buy xAI, he gets to swap worthless shares in that company for more SpaceX liquidity. Simple as that.

Really seems silly to think that the guy with $800 billion is spending most of his time maximizing his money.

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Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#674

Post by Numerlor »

killerstorm wrote: post #663
beloch wrote: post #115

I would not assume cooling has been worked out. Space is a vacuum. i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping your drink hot. A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos. A data center in space would necessarily rely completely on cooling by radiation, unlike a terrestrial data center that can make use of convection and conduction. You can't just pipe heat out into the atmosphere or build…

People did the calculation: radiative cooling requires smaller surface area than solar panels. So, basically, a solar panel itself can radiate heat. Have you done a calculation yourself?

How can the solar panel itself radiate heat when it's being heated up generating supplying power? Looking at pictures of the ISS there's radiators that look like they're there specifically to cool the solar panels.

And even if viable, why would you just not cool using air down on earth? Water is used for cooling because it increases effectiveness significantly, but even a closed loop system with simple dry air heat exchangers is quite a lot more effective than radiative cooling

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#675

Post by a_victorp »

theshrike79 wrote: post #622
georgemcbay wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Like any other mega-scaler, theyre just playing Money Chicken. Everyone is spending crazy amounts of money in the hopes that the competition will tap out because they can't afford it anymore. Then they can cool down on their spending and increase prices to a sustainable level because they have an effective monopoly.

Money Chicken is the best term I've seen for this!

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#676

Post by mxfh »

The whole premise misses the point, that earth is somehow in the very same space too.

Adding a global UHVDC grid to even out dips in local PV performance due to cloud cover and the diurnal cycle on spaceship earth seems to be magnitudes cheaper and scaleable than this loony pitch.

The only thing making this hard is requiring supranational collaboration.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#677

Post by trimethylpurine »

beloch wrote: post #115

I would not assume cooling has been worked out. Space is a vacuum. i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping your drink hot. A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos. A data center in space would necessarily rely completely on cooling by radiation, unlike a terrestrial data center that can make use of convection and conduction. You can't just pipe heat out into the atmosphere or build…

You can't exchange heat with vacuum

If you put a pipe with hot gas inside, in space, it will get colder by convection.

Blow air through the pipe.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#678

Post by rswail »

threecheese wrote: post #256
Terr_ wrote: post #31

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…

Stole Grok from Heinlein. At least it’s a good heuristic for people-I-don’t-have-to-take-seriously.

Heinlein's sci fi didn't age well, because it was written for juveniles and then later his social ideas overtook his sci fi ones.

He had the same blind spots that Ayn Rand did, but perhaps better informed of the fascist-adjacent US culture.

One of the good sci fi/social ideas he had was about what it meant to "grok" something. groklaw.net of happy memory was exactly what that verb was supposed to mean, dive into something until you understand it at a molecular level.

The fact that Musk et al have stolen terms like "grok" and even "cyberspace" as if they own them is something I loathe.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#679

Post by jacquesm »

bborud wrote: post #648
FranklinJabar wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is probably plenty of scope to optimize space radiators. It was never a priority until now and is "just" an engineering problem. Well, it's a physics problem. The engineering solution is possibly not cost efficient. I'd put a lot of money that it isn't.

That bit reminded me of someone who wanted us to design a patch the size of a small postage stamp, at most 0.2mm thick, so you could stick on products. It was to deliver power for two years of operation, run an LTE modem, a GNSS receiver, an MCU, temperature and humidity sensor and would cost $0.10. And it would send back telemetry twice per day.

'A mere matter of engineering'.
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