Not to mention that one time he saved all those trapped kids with his custom-built submarine.

Have to destroy the rockets that are used to maintain them then and just wait.

Dude stop

I was under the impressions cpu's were very sensitive to radiation. If we could mine and manufacture in space I could see this maybe.

dude! how do you expect anyone to answer if you don't say surely you can't be?

Um, it doesn't make the data center in orbit thing make sense, but a geostationary satellite absolute moves at high speed and does not stay in the same place in space.

Oh, thanks. I felt something is "unusual" about it.

Thanks!

They aren't maintained. They're a constellation of small satellites in LEO like starlink that just go up and eventually come down.

If they're too far up latency would be too high

No one is repairing any of these starlink type dishes.

It’s not speculation. Nvidia themselves have run experiments with GPUs in orbit, and the issue gets worse with smaller lithography (eg newer chips).

It doesn’t matter.

It’s a fantasy in billionaire's heads, a self-perpetuating meme, and no one is telling them no. So they’re going to fund it, whether it makes any sense or not.

Reality doesn’t really matter anymore.

Subpoena the ground stations if that was true?

That’s because science literacy is pretty low.

And to be fair, the average person doesn’t need to understand vacuum thermodynamics. The issues is when a few of those “average people” are now billionaires making unilateral decisions, surrounded by yes men and feeds instead of experts informing them of reality.

A radiator. Next question?

We already have data centers in space.

Geostationary satellites are not standing still. They're orbiting the Earth at the same rate that it rotates "beneath" them.

Oh yeah it's totally a bullshit argument, it wouldn't hold water in any court. Hell if nothing else, the ground stations like you said, or the country whose airspace the center exists over, would be in jurisdiction.

But I do believe that Musk believes it's a get out of jail free card.

What's going to be performing convection to dissipate heat from the radiator in a manner to support the heat generated by an AI data center?

What part of radiator don't you understand?

If starship works (huge if) the markets it can open will be very different than the markets Falcon9 opened.

Something will need to develop around the new capabilities to use beyond their own use for starlink, but its going to be much easier for companies to come up with uses for it.

They make most of their money off starlink now, not ISS.

Tell me if I'm wrong, but with the shielding they have on the ISS doesn't it have issues that consumer grade computers they use last a few months due to various radiation and heat that they die? So an AI data center is going to be insane to protect long enough to make its components useful.

They're called fins. Not panels.

Oh? Good. Problem solved then.

Tell me you don't know how radiators actually work without telling me. They dissipate heat via convection through the air surrounding them or gasses in general. What does space lack a significant amount of?

What you don’t understand is the size requirements those radiators would need to have to cool an entire data center.

I am serious, and don't call me dude!

Radiators dissipate heat through...wait for it...
Radiation.

Agreed. The US can access/subpoena any data it wants from US companies, even if the servers they host the data on are in Europe or Asia or...

It doesn't matter where the servers and the data is located. It matters who posses (or controls the access) to it.

But in space its the only option you have

Hmm, this has me thinking about the stealth ships in The Expanse. The engineering needed to make it work makes me want to cry, but in principle you could run a Peltier cooler with a swappable heat sink.

To be clear, I don't think this is a viable option, but it's interesting to think about.

Ah right, he also saved them from the "pedophile".

Alexander, is that you?

Also the whole being a vacuum thing makes heat dissipation much more difficult.

Of course they are, same with undersea data centers (for different reasons).

But it doesn't matter. In the late-stage capitalism we find ourselves in, you don't need a real product, nor a promising prototype. You don't even need a good idea, you just need the promise that you'll come up with a good idea soon. That's enough to get the investors drooling, the shareholders hyped, and the gullible idiots engaged.

And you only have to maintain that long enough to pay yourself and your insiders some fat checks. Then when inevitably, reality barges in and people start to realize it was all bullshit and pipe dreams, you've already cashed out. If your PR team is good, the media and your sycophantic fans will praise you as a visionary who was simply, "ahead of their time." And you can go on to rip off more people.

It's basically Patreon scams but with billions of dollars.

Obnoxious as he seems to be, he's actually right, there will be no convection, but they'd radiate heat in a vacuum, by IR IIRC.

It's as stupid as solar roadways, a solution nobody asked for and we also already have way better solutions.

I mean why.

They already run AMD chips on starlink, so they've figured out someway to shield them in most cases. Some solar flares at bad times (something about while raising orbits) has nuked some dishes before.

Its probably cheaper to account for some expected losses, than shield them perfectly.

Raditors. Starlink v3 can in theory already shed (edit 20) kW of heat. But they would need to figure out how to 5x that and keep things profitable.

The area of radiator needed directly corresponds to the amount of power harvested by the solar panels. It doesn't matter what the load is. So a compute frame with the same amount of solar panels as the space station would need approximately the same radiatot area as the ISS, unless you are bringing nuclear power into the mix.

I agree that space based datacenters are a bad idea, but the thermals really are not the gotcha people are making them out to be.

Im pretty sure they are shielded as I think I have seen stuff like that for the electronics in the iss. Thing is that the eletronics in sattelites and the space station are pretty small relative to datacenters. The only benefit I can really see is maybe they can be solar powered which I guess if the panel acts as shielding and stays sun facing but all the extra expense of getting it up there. I just don't see it as practical. I mean technically it should either work or not basedo on cost as long as they don't wring out any subudies or soemthing.

Solar roadways are the future! Driving on solar panels is the only way forward. Until all our roads are solar we will never be free people.

I think everyone is really confusing what these datacenters are.

They aren't these massive things. They're going to be a little bigger than v3 starlinks all working together in some manner. The best estiamte we have on size is v3 is 20kW of power, and these will be ~100kW

Edit: also power doesnt necessarily mean size. The GPUs will put off more heat per size i bet than whatever is in starlink, and even if it 5x'd the size of the computing area of the dish compared to starlink, that's still tiny. It's the radiator that will take up the space, not the datacenter portion.

By the time you launched and assembled one in orbit their hardware would already be outdated. Sounds like a great plan!

I wish them the same success that the metaverse once had.

Basically the way you would make a stealth spaceship would be by focusing as much as possible on energy efficiency. At every juncture you would try to use as little power as possible, and use every bit of it as efficiently as possible, so that you're not remitting waste. That waste, in the form of heat, radio waves, etc, is what gets you spotted.

You could also run heatsinks temporarily for enhanced stealth as you suggest, then open up radiators to cool them - or eject them - once it's safe to do so.

(For the Elite: Dangerous players, yes, that game got it right.)

Yep. Radiation is deadly to computers, and without the atmosphere to protect you there is a LOT of radiation in space.

And you can only build so many of those radiator panels before you start running into congestion problems. You don't want them radiating onto each other.

Little Space James

ugh so we are talking massive constellations. That is so much worse.

Ya its going to be massive, I imagine larger than starlink if these dreams come true.

Late stage capitalism just means late stage fiat currency doesn't it, since all the money flooding in is debt and QE, and every dollar created and placed into the market is new cheap debt issuance?

Then we bail all the bad debt out when it fails, so the perverse incentive to issue bad debt is always there, because its not capitalist and nobody would backstop this mess if it was their own capital.