791–800 of 1001 posts
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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.
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…
Of course it doesn’t fucking make sense to put data centers into space. Even if heating were solved somehow magically, server disks are veeery prone to fail and need replacement. Shoot a rocket up every week to replace failed drives or absolutely burned through GPUs? Yeah, that doesn’t even remotely sound feasible.
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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…
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…
“Musk is on to something here”? Really? Any high school student with a basic grasp of physics could explain that. But sure, the idiot billionaire nazi “is on to something”. That’s giving him too much credit. Of course it doesn’t fucking make sense to put data centers into space. Even if heating were solved somehow magically, server disks are veeery prone to fail and need replacement. Shoot a rocket up every week to r…
How's that full-self driving promised for decades working out?
How's the destruction of USAID working out (oh you wouldn't know a million dead now)
We already have a data-center in space, sort-of, here's how many radiation panels it has to deploy for just the heat produced from the small number of low-power computers
* https://i.sstatic.net/cpIBo.jpg
(ISS, all those white panels are thermal heat radiators)
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…
He is very influenced by The Culture of Iain Banks. They're really good sci-fi... and describe a hedonistic world where machines do the hard thinking and bidding of the biologicals. https://recommentions.com/elon-musk/books/culture-by-iain-ba... https://www.vox.com/culture/413502/iain-banks-culture-series... https://fortune.com/2025/12/15/billionaire-elon-musk-say-tha... > Musk pointed to The Culture series by Iain M…
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“Musk is on to something here”? Really? Any high school student with a basic grasp of physics could explain that. But sure, the idiot billionaire nazi “is on to something”. That’s giving him too much credit. Of course it doesn’t fucking make sense to put data centers into space. Even if heating were solved somehow magically, server disks are veeery prone to fail and need replacement. Shoot a rocket up every week to r…
Unless you want cash-rich AI companies to pay a certain company for weekly / daily lifts during the build-out phase. Eventual crash be damned, make hay while the sun shines
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I think there's something to be said about imagining a future where we can keep the earth clean of all the nasty industrial processes we have grown accustomed to living next to. A big part about this proposed idea is that you could do a lot of manufactoring in space. I have long theorized there will be some game changing manufacturing processes that can only be done in a zero gravity environment. EX: - 3d printing hu…
We're able to make 3D computer chips on Earth today, and I don't know about you but all my organs managed to get made just fine on Earth. Doesn't seem like we need zero g to do either of these things. Either way, this isn't about 3D printing organs, this is about launching AI compute into space. To do important stuff, like making AI generated CSAM without worry of government intervention.
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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…
> There is probably plenty of scope to optimize space radiators. It was never a priority until now and is "just" an engineering problem. It's a physics problem, as others pointed out, but even if we take it as another "just an engineering problem", have a look at the Hyperloop. Which is similarly just a long vacuum tube, and inside is like an air hockey table, not that big a deal, right?...
