I am just honestly confused. There seem to be no logical reason for it, except that it would raise the stock value of rocket producers like SpaceX and Blue Origin.
it would raise the stock value of rocket producers like SpaceX and Blue Origin.
Nailed it. Data centers in space is an objectively terrible idea but most people are too stupid to understand why. They see it as free real estate in the ignorance of the logistical problems of constructing structures in space large enough to be of any use, let alone powering and cooling them. The failure of the American education system has made the populace an easy hunting ground for modern Snake Oil salesmen.
You just wouldn’t. The ISS is the largest thing we’ve ever built in space previously. It has an internal area about equal to a 747 passenger jet. That’s about 4800 sq ft, but the entire structure is about the size of a football field, with the solar panels needed to power it and whatnot - that’s 57,800 sq ft total space taken up to get that 4800 sq ft. The average data center currently is around 100,000 sq ft. The ISS took about 1000 hours of space walking and 136 space flights to build. So we need 20 times the ISS to build one average data center, so 20,000 hours (that’s a team of 10 people working 12 hour shifts for 166 days) of space walking to build, 2700 space flights, and it would1 take up over 1 million square feet of space in the sky.
OH, and that is completely ignoring the fact that ISS orbits earth in 90 minutes. Maintaining data transfer capabilities from that to Earth would be a nightmare and building a structure that big that close to Earth also means it’s going to be BRIGHT in the night sky (like, ok, not as bright as a full moon or anything, but 20 times brighter than ISS which is the 3rd brightest thing in our night sky already… This data center would be well ahead and into the number 2 spot, you literally wouldn’t be able to miss it).
OH OH, that is also ignoring how incredibly difficult it would be to cool. Cooling components on the ISS is one of the biggest challenges because there is nowhere for the heat to go. So add on hauling several million gallons of water to space every month I guess? I dunno what their plan would even look like for cooling that is such a monumental problem.
AND THAT IS JUST ONE AVERAGE DATA CENTER. The cost would be astronomical. The environmental impact would be devastating. The repercussions would be severe. The benefit would be almost non-existent and very short lived if there even was any.
1 - Ok, this is all napkin math based on what it took to build the ISS. Could it be done more efficiently the second time around? Maybe, but we aren’t just talking about ISS 2: Electric Boogaloo either, we are talking about a giant 20x structure. Chances are it would be even worse than these estimates - and where the hell is SpaceX going to get the actual physical man-power to do the construction of this thing in orbit??
That also assumes this is done in the same orbit as the ISS right? The ISS isn’t in a stable orbit, right?. It occasionally needs to adjust its orbit because of atmospheric drag. You’re talking about 20x the area which could be a considerable difference in mass. That’s more fuel needed per burn which also needs to be transported up to the data center. Otherwise you are looking at putting this thing in an even higher orbit which comes with its own host of problems.
Like, actually building a data center in space would bankrupt Space X. But the hype from a bunch of dumbasses saying they are going to makes them a shit load of money, because our system is dumb.
Oh yea, 100%. I meant to talk about that in my first “OH” section, lol. The ISS is low. You either have to build it further out or have a nearly constant supply of fuel to keep it in the sky. Building it further out means more fuel and time to get to it and less frequent viable mission launch windows, so more difficult to build, but that is still probably the smarter choice than building it at the ISS altitude and needing rocket fuel sent up almost as much as water for cooling…
Ding ding!
- It’s not better for cooling. - No air or water to dissipate heat.
- It’s not better for communication. - Beaming data is always more lossy than its physically connected counterpart.
- It’s not less expensive. - Just submerge it, or build closer to the poles with wind and solar to power it
Also, it throws more junk in our orbit, is more difficult to maintain and upgrade, and has a significantly more catastrophic fail result.
But why do things logically or sustainably when you* can make money?
* you = someone who already is hoarding a large portion of our wealth.
But then how do they make money out of it?
By scamming investors and fooling shareholders.
same way musk made a shitton of money with hyperloop: by getting other people to pay for it and then not actually do it.
I don’t think it makes any sense either:
- Cooling will be large and expensive as hell
- Getting computers there will be expensive
- Getting solar cells there will be expensive
- The radiolink to earthbound networks will be expensive and slow
The only positive is that the energy will be cheap, and that the computers are safe except from nation state actors and untracked space debris.
I lean towards this being a narrative for the markets. Space Exploration Technologies Corp. claimed a 370 billion USD total addressable market (TAM) in space enabled solutions, and a 26.5 trillion USD TAM for AI in their S-1 filing before going public. They state within that their goal over time is to launch 100 gigawatts of compute to space each year.
By making the claim that this would be worthwhile they present themselves as uniquely positioned to profit from this situation. Moreso than other AI compute companies or other rocket launch companies.
there isn’t any good reason. you should start giving less attention to those who shout loudest, IMO.
You answered half of your own question.
“it would raise the value of rocket producers like SpaceX and Blue Origin.”
The other thing is a complete lack of jurisdiction. At least theoretically, nobody can go after them for generating grossly illegal content in space.
Also, pure hypermasculine fetishism.
Also, pure hypermasculine fetishism.
This is the weirdest take on data centers ever.
but … it checks out?
No, it seems like you understand it perfectly.
ever heard of the Nazi bases on the moon?
yeah. that’s why.
This idea is a total scam. This is just a way of asking investors for an enormous amount of money, with literally no intention of actually following through with it.
They might throw a couple of cheap satellites in orbit, just to say they “did it”…but no one with any actual comprehension of these things is honestly expecting it to yield results. The vast majority of that investment money, is going to be used for unrelated things.
In any sane world, this would be considered fraud. But, here we are.
Remember when Microsoft dumped containers of servers in the ocean to test things.
If they couldn’t make that work they obviously can’t make space work.
It was always a scam.
You’re talking about project Natick. All reports I saw was that it was actually a resounding success. The only reason I’ve seen for why it was cancelled is because it wasn’t able to be kept at the bleeding edge as they couldn’t upgrade the servers randomly. It doesn’t really compare to launching them into space which gives basically zero benefit but adds an insane amount to the cost.
“resounding success” but given up as a bad idea.
The fact that it could possibly “work” was not really in question, it was whether it would be worth the costs and drawbacks. It was not.
But either way you are right, space even worse than water with no benefit compared to ocean.
Not only upgrading hardware, but maintaining any issues along the way. Hard drives fail, Memory fails, etc. That’s just stuff that happens and can be easily remedied in a normal data center.
Now take all of those issues, and instead of being underwater… move it 500 miles into the vacuum of space. And take the heat dissipation of all that water, and make it a fraction because the vacuum of space is terrible at radiating heat despite the ambient temperature being so cold.
Cosmic radiation causes random bit flips. You would have to shield everything and make it redundant. More power, more heat, more cooling, more power… Welcome to the loop.
Yeah… No maintenance… Which is a thing that datacenters require.
Enterprise Hardware can have redundancy but things still break.
If it was a success they would have done it. Ergo, not a success.
IDK about success.
I think it went predictably in that the cooling was ok but maintenance was an issue.
Seawater is a real bitch. If you could cool things with it we would just pump it onshore.
The core reason space datacenters are uneconomical, is the 5 year replacement cycle. Includes trashing the solar and radiators every 5 years even if they could last 30+ because datacenter modules need to auto-deploy their own power and radiators. Ocean deployments would be far better. Wind/solar/batteries doesn’t need frequent change. Just drop in a new module every 5 years, while taking out the old one, and rebuilding its insides.
Nah nah, we aren’t allowed to do wind and solar anymore. The US president is paying a shitload of money to a lot of companies to stop them from developing renewables in the US and abroad.
The microsoft thing worked. It also highlighted a lot of issues that would also exists in space, but way worse.
But “genius billionaire buffoon” can’t read apparently.
It functioned, mostly, but I wouldn’t say it worked.
Microsoft? Hahaha. Like Microsoft would know shit about doing anything in space?
While Elon has no issues crashing and burning, no matter how many times it takes, until he succeeds… That’s a true commitment to trial and error!
I wish you could make money off of nowing when a company is spouting bullshit, but after watching Tesla stock for a decade…
There’s no reason, Musk is just bullshiting like with Mars colony by 2025.
This. I don’t know how any supports is companies. This man has the attention span of a cocker spaniel on Ketamine.
He just says stupid shit all the time and people are supposed to pretend this it’s a wise business decision.
BS is fair, 90% of it. There needed to be an excuse for xAI merger is origin of the BS.
They’re harder for us to burn to the fucking ground if we can’t reach them.
I believe Apartheid Pedo cited space being cold as a reason (ie don’t have to worry about cooling the servers), except as usual he’s a fuckwit with no idea what he’s talking about. Space is empty, which means there’s nothing to carry heat away, so the only way to lose heat is via radiation. And that takes forever.
Yeah I think space stations have to literally worry about not radiating enough heat away. If there is no medium to transfer the heat into the heat can’t really go away. One of the many unintuitive features of space
To the point that they occasionally have to use the solar panels to shade the radiators.
Thermals in space are difficult
We can just terraform space duh
Falcon Heavy with a shitload of ice cubes
The tech billiionaires got annoyed by regulations and complaints and are looking for a easier way.
We towed it outside the environment.
Into another environment, no?
Meanwhile China is putting them underwater for passive cooling.
They do? MS tried too, but too much issues with marine life, corrosion and accessibility for repairs/replacement. With the third also being a issue with space, but x100.
Saw this awhile back and kinda rolled my eyes. I see the appeal of the idea, but the execution seems unnecessarily complicated for little gain. The space one is even worse, the sheer amount of fuel to lift that kind of weight is just a stupid waste.
that the water footprint of datacentres could reach 9.3tn litres by 2030 – enough to service the annual domestic water needs of all 1.3 billion residents of sub-Saharan Africa.
And then they wonder about the spike in climate warming, with water vapor being one of the most effective greenhouse gases.
It was an interesting experiment for certain but it’d be easier overall I think to make a desalinization plant to produce more water specifically for the data center to cool with.
Skynet. They want to build skynet. Go watch Terminator. I guess that’s going to become a posthumous documentary.
- Global geographic coverage with very low dependence on local infrastructure
- Extremely difficult physical access compared with a conventional datacenter
- Enormous distributed sensor/communications/computing network
- Integration with Starlink’s existing global communications infrastructure
- Resilience against localized disasters or attacks
- Direct access to governments and militaries that want autonomous communications, sensing, and computation
- Essentially uninterruptible power source
- Guided weapon systems, military intelligence and recon
Etc… come on. It’s skynet! That’s the funny thing you called a data center but really that’s kind of the least of what’s going on.
My theory is that it’s so they are beyond the reach of protesters, the law, etc. I think that is going to be a very in-demand property for servers going forward.
With the money that it costs to send an entire data center to space you can easily fortify and militarize your data center on earth to the extent that no protester will ever come close?
The law is anyway already largely under their control right? They don’t have to go to space to evade the law.
And to the extent that the law still applies to them and constraints then, doesn’t it also still apply to the necessary ground-based necessities for space based data centers? As in, if the state wants to shut them down, they can still do so?
It’s a good point that providing the security systems of nuclear power plants is cheaper and more job creating than space datacenters. You can also get more uppity when international adversaries nuke your datacenter on US soil as opposed to space.
But more money to a guy that recycles $100m+ into politicians every election cycle, provides decision maker influence to subsidize space skynet. Continuity of nazi/zionazi ideology may require being beyond any temporary loss of control over law.
necessary ground-based necessities for space based data centers?
They could be configured such that no off switch exists, no manual administration is required, and it’s a fully self-sovereign system that can only be shut down by sending a missile to space, and physically accessing it to extract the data or encryption keys it contains is even harder.
you can easily fortify and militarize your data center on earth to the extent that no protester will ever come close?
Only if your definition of “protester” excludes anyone using weaponized drones, but that misses the point. The current meta for fortifications right now clearly favors the attackers, and that’s especially going to be true for a facility requiring large power inputs. That meta no longer applies if your data castle is in space.
Shooting down satellites isn’t scifi anymore. Any medium sized country can do it if they want to.
Why don’t they already then? Russia could shoot down satellites providing communications to Ukrainian drones for instance, couldn’t they? I think it is because doing so triggers a large shitstorm and real geopolitical consequences, if it becomes the norm then no one will get to benefit from any satellites, so a smaller and less influential country is not getting off easy if they do that, same kind of deal as nukes and access to them except probably a little less so. The similarity being that there is a cutoff point below which no one has access, and above which heavy coercion and other manipulation can be imposed as an effective deterrent.
Mostly because it’s expensive and some satellites are in way higher orbit than you want to fire randomly at, and hitting just a few satellites is more of a very very expensive annoyance unless you’re doing it to time it with other strikes (and yes there’s also escalation risk, but countries without their own satellites won’t care much)
They could be configured such that no off switch exists
Power grid dependence can be a weak point. Democracy can clash with CIA/oligarchy. A big enough mob can overwhelm security forces not particularly ideologically aligned to defending skynet.
