Comment by ziofill
9 months ago
Perhaps I'm missing something, but if the only energy they get is coming from the sun, then they only need to dissipate that same amount of heat (minus whatever energy was needed for beaming data down to Earth).
9 months ago
Perhaps I'm missing something, but if the only energy they get is coming from the sun, then they only need to dissipate that same amount of heat (minus whatever energy was needed for beaming data down to Earth).
The wrinkle is that taking it in is much, much easier than radiating it back into space.
What you're missing is that you'd have a huge solar array that powers something much smaller, so that energy gets concentrated into a small area.
That’s not how it works. With conservation of energy, all the energy coming in to power the computers has to be emitted somehow. Powering computers doesn’t get rid of the energy, it just makes it unusable and converts it into heat.
Right and that's why the heat is the problem, in space.
But if the collected heat comes from a large area of solar-cells, and is then focused on the small area of a computer or graphics-card, that computer might melt.
This is probably a stupid question but is it possible to recycle the heat back into electricity and use it again?
2 replies →
Yeah, that's my point.