681–690 of 1001 posts
This sentence proves the author has no ability for logical thinking: Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost effective relative to normal data centers. I too don't think it's currently a sensible solution. But the author completely unable to make a proper case. For instance, just to refute that one claim, there are many reasons to do it in space even at an cost. Space-based data centers provide an off-…
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It sounds hard but it shouldn't not make sense. 1. Solving cost of launching mass has been the entire premise of SpaceX since day one and they have the track record. 2. Ingress/egress aren't at all bottlenecks for inferencing. The bytes you get before you max out a context window are trivial, especially after compression. If you're thinking about latency, chat latencies are already quite high and there's going to be…
I have no expertise is this area, so I'm not getting into whether or not this idea makes sense. That being said, this statement strikes me as missing the point: > Solving cost of launching mass has been the entire premise of SpaceX since day one and they have the track record. As I understand it, SpaceX has a good track record of putting things into space more cost effectively than other organisations that put things…
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> sure space is cold Even this isn't true. It's ~120 degC in daylight in LEO. It only gets cold in the shade, but a solar powered data center is pretty useless in the shade.
The solar labels are in the sun. Behind them they are in the shade.
As others point out this is a bad idea. Asside from the other excellent comments on power consumption, cooling and radiation. One point I didn't see being made in the comments much is maintenance costs. Now I don't find myself in the facility of a data center often in daily life, however I do know that medium to big data centers require 24/7 hardware replacement. I believe this is what those 5 guys with the bikes and…
Can SpaceX not just say "OK, GPU #7 on satellite #15872 is broken, don't use it" and just accept that they're now overbuilt on power/cooling for that sat?
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…
it could be easier just to build in orbit. its a lot closer, sites can be positioned above various geographic locations as required. i think the moon likely does contain vast mineral deposits though. when europeans first started exploring australia they found mineral anomalies that havent existed in europe since the bronze age. the Pilbara mining region is very cool. it contains something like 25% of the iron ore on…
They were also working on a "zero energy" train that would run "downhill" from the mines to the ports to charge its batteries that would then take the empty train back to the mine.
Battery tech wasn't sufficient (yet), but that doesn't mean it can't come back when solid state and sodium ion batteries come online.
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It's exiting the 5th best social network and the 10th (or worse) best AI company and selling them to a decent company. It probably increases Elon's share of the combined entity. It delivers on a promise to investors that he will make money for them, even as the underlying businesses are lousy.
I'm confused about the level of conversation here. Can we actually run the math on heat dissipation and feasibility? A Starlink satellite uses about 5K Watts of solar power. It needs to dissipate around that amount (+ the sun power on it) just to operate. There are around 10K starlink satellites already in orbit, which means that the Starlink constellation is already effectively equivalent to a 50 Mega-watt (in a rou…
Distributing useful work over so many small objects is a very hard problem, and not even shown to be possible at useful scales for many of the things AI datacenters are doing today. And that's with direct cables - using wireless communication means even less bandwidth between nodes, more noise as the number of nodes grows, and significantly higher power use and complexity for the communication in the first place.
Building data centres in the middle of the sahara desert is still much better in pretty much every metric than in space, be it price, performance, maintainance, efficiency, ease of cooling, pollution/"trash" disposal etc. Even things like communication network connectivity would be easier, as at the amounts of money this constellation mesh would cost you could lay new fibre optic cables to build an entire new global network to anywhere on earth and have new trunk connections to every major hub.
There are advantages to being in space - normally around increased visibility for wireless signals, allowing great distances to be covered at (relatively) low bandwidth. But that comes at an extreme cost. Paying that cost for a use case that simply doesn't get much advantages from those benefits is nonsense.
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> 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)…
Yeah, but landing a rocket backwards also sounded very improbable to me, yet it looks pretty cool now. Also people made fun of tesla that it will never be able to compete with the big carmakers. Now I would rather have some stocks in tesla than holding on to volkswagen.
Famous investors like to repeat the quote that “when the tide goes out, that’s when we find out who’s wearing no pants.” When Tesla actually weathers its first market downturn is when we find out how much investors interest is maintained When investment dollars are scarce.
There are plenty of legit concerns here about e.g. the launch externalities which are actually greater than the launch costs themselves, i.e. climate impact to future generations. However one flaw in this critique is that is only looks at the cost of ground-based solar panels and not their overall scalability. That is, manufacturing cost is far from the only factor. There is also the need for real estate in areas wit…
> There is also the need for real estate in areas with good sun exposure that also have sufficient fresh water supply for cleaning. Solar panels are 20x more efficient than growing corn for ethanol. Swap out some of those 30 million acres of ethanol corn fields (in the US) and you'll have more energy than you need. More details here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM
You plant a PV panel and add its irrigation (power interconnect) and remote monitoring, then you harvest power for the next 25+ years.
Ethanol production excess is a specific US problem because of the misalignment of incentives and lobbying.
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The solar labels are in the sun. Behind them they are in the shade.
In close proximity, and connected to metal structures radiating & conducting heat at 120 degrees. You still have to expel that heat somehow, and route it around the spacecraft core.