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xAI joins SpaceX

spacex.com

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Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#781

Post by rafaelmn »

protastus wrote: post #106
Buttons840 wrote: post #50

SpaceX is too big to fail. It's important for national security. I wonder if Elon wants to tangle all his businesses into SpaceX so they are all kept afloat by SpaceX's importance.

Elon can't legally financially entangle Tesla to SpaceX due to Tesla being a public company, so his hands are tied. Tesla is clearly benefiting from protectionism and its sales would collapse if BYD were allowed to openly sell in the US. Most people just want affordable, maintainable and reliable cars.

> Tesla is clearly benefiting from protectionism and its sales would collapse if BYD were allowed to openly sell in the US

So would most of EU car makers in Europe. China is not playing by the same rules and everyone with car manufacturing domestically is slamming them with tariffs.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#782

Post by dtj1123 »

gok wrote: post #45

> it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the Sun’s power We currently make around 1 TW of photovoltaic cells per year, globally. The proposal here is to launch that much to space every 9 hours, complete with attached computers, continuously, from the moon. edit: Also, this would capture a very trivial…

Whilst I agree that this glosses over a huge number of technical obstacles, space based solar power could scale more easily than that on earth. Lack of variable weather and gravity means rather than using photovoltaic cells, you can just set up paper thin huge mirrors to focus light and generate steam.

Caveat: my understanding of this largely comes from the book The High Frontier, which is really old and probably inaccurate. I can't think of a reason why this particular point would be wrong though.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#783

Post by pantalaimon »

nwellinghoff wrote: post #695
rainsford wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We also shouldn't overlook the fact that the proposal entirely glosses over the implication of the alternative benefits we might realize if humanity achieved the incredible engineering and technical capacity necessary to make this version of space AI happen. Think about it. Elon conjures up a vision of the future where we've managed to increase our solar cell manufacturing capacity by two whole orders of magnitude an…

Yeah it does not make a whole lot of sense as the useful lifespan of the gpus in 4-6 years. Sooo what happens when you need to upgrade or repair?

Same that happens with Starlink satellites that are obsolete or exhausted their fuel - they burn up in the atmosphere.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#784

Post by Wilder7977 »

JeremyNT wrote: post #444
alangibson wrote: post #89

Either this is a straight up con, or Musk found a glitch in physics. It's extremely difficult to keep things cold in space.

It's such bullshit that we've decided this moron and others in his cohort can unilaterally reallocate such vast portions of humanity's labor at their whims. This is an extremely stupid idea, but because of our shared delusion of capitalism and the idea that wealth accumulation at the top should be effectively limitless, this guy gets to screw around and divert actual human labor towards insane and useless projects li…

I wanted to come and express this thought, but you did that already very well, thanks for that.

I am saddened too by the fact that the system is designed so that people like him can waste a large amount of economic and human capital.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#785

Post by lpcvoid »

n_u wrote: post #463

A former NASA engineer with a PhD in space electronics who later worked at Google for 10 years wrote an article about why datacenters in space are very technically challenging: https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri... I don't have any specialized knowledge of the physics but I saw an article suggesting the real reason for the push to build them in space is to hedge against political pushback pr…

Nice article, the first one. I hope they try it, burn many billions of cash, and then fail. I also hope they don't spread radioactive material across the whole atmosphere when failing, though.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#786

Post by seydor »

You can only form one bubble. If spacex IPOs and rockets, Tsla will go to $10.

We need more 'moonshot promisers' like Elon going public. Come on AGI people, come on immortality people

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#787

Post by mort96 »

rafaelmn wrote: post #781
protastus wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon can't legally financially entangle Tesla to SpaceX due to Tesla being a public company, so his hands are tied. Tesla is clearly benefiting from protectionism and its sales would collapse if BYD were allowed to openly sell in the US. Most people just want affordable, maintainable and reliable cars.

> Tesla is clearly benefiting from protectionism and its sales would collapse if BYD were allowed to openly sell in the US So would most of EU car makers in Europe. China is not playing by the same rules and everyone with car manufacturing domestically is slamming them with tariffs.

How isn't China playing by the same rules? Every country subsidises and supports industry it thinks is important, surely nothing would stop Germany from investing into Volkswagen and BMW or the US from investing into Ford the same way China invests into BYD?

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#788

Post by kaon_2 »

Urgh... Elon is famous not for things he's done, but for saying things he is going to do. Do people still buy in to this? Elon Musk always promises things far in the future but doesn't make good on them. He hasn't succeeded in self driving cars. He is never going to mars. He is not solving the LA traffic problem with tunnels. His robots are the equivalent of the Metaverse. He's a phenomenal businessman, and understands that a story is part of that.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#789

Post by haspok »

SilverElfin wrote: post #157
Buttons840 wrote: post #50

SpaceX is too big to fail. It's important for national security. I wonder if Elon wants to tangle all his businesses into SpaceX so they are all kept afloat by SpaceX's importance.

Let’s be honest - this is just a way to prop up Twitter/X. It makes SpaceX shareholders subsidize X, and also American taxpayers who are giving contracts to SpaceX for highly sensitive things. The government should ideally refuse to give SpaceX work unless it unwinds this.

If anything, I think this is actually the other way around - channeling crazy AI bubble money towards SpaceX, after the funding from goverment contracts has dried up. Twitter is just the icing on the cake.

Quite ingenious, you have to give Musk that. This is why he is making so much money.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#790

Post by stingraycharles »

bawolff wrote: post #724

We have trouble cooling data centers on earth, so instead we are going to put them in space where cooling is a thousand times harder?

I think the idea is that energy production is a bigger bottleneck and easier in space.

Not saying I agree / disagree, but this seems to be the general thesis of people supporting this idea.

That, and the lack of regulation.

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