Comment by rainsford
9 hours ago
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 and have the space launch capability for all of it along with tons and tons of other stuff and the best he comes up with is...GPUs in orbit?
This is essentially the superhero gadget technology problem, where comic books and movies gloss over the the civilization changing implications of some technology the hero invents to punch bad guys harder. Don't get me wrong, the idea of orbiting data centers is kind of cool if we can pull it off. But being able to pull if off implies an ability to do a lot more interesting things. The problem is that this is both wildly overambitious and somehow incredibly myopic at the same time.
A lot of great inventions we now take for granted initially came with little motivation other than being able to kill each other more effectively. GPS, radar, jet engines, drones, super glue, microwaves, canned food, computers, even the internet. Contrary to the narrative of the internet being about sharing science, ARPANET was pushed by the DoD as a means of maintaining comms during nuclear war. It was then adopted by universities and research labs and started along the trajectory most are more familiar with.
The tale of computers is even more absurd. The first programmable, electric, and general-purpose digital computer was ENIAC. [1] It was built to... calculate artillery firing tables. I expect in the future that the idea of putting a bunch of solar into space to run GPUs for LLMs will probably seem, at the minimum - quaint, but that doesn't mean the story ends there.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC
That’s not the point of the person you are replying to. They are saying if we somehow come up with the tech that makes harnessing the sun a thing, the best we can still do is put a bunch of GPUs in space? It makes no sense.
It kinda does make sense if you consider that solar panels in space have been used for a very long time (to power satellites). However, getting the electricity they generate down to Earth is very complicated, so you end up having to use it in space, and one of few things that would make sense for that is indeed data centers, because getting the data to Earth is easier (and Elon already handily has a solution for that).
However I'm curious how many solar panels you would need to power a typical data center. Are we talking something like a large satellite, or rather a huge satellite with ISS-size solar arrays bolted on? Getting rid of the copious amounts of heat that data centers generate might also be a challenge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_thermal_control)...
3 replies →
>the best we can
oh, we'll sure find a way to weaponize that energy for example - just imagine all those panels simultaneously turning their reflective back in a way to form gigantic mirror to focus reflected solar energy on your enemy, be that enemy in space or on the Earth/Moon/Mars ground. Basically space-scale version of 'death ray scyscrapper' https://www.businessinsider.com/death-ray-skyscraper-is-wrea....
Back in the day the Star Wars program was intending to use nuclear explosions to power the lasers, i guess once all that solar for AI gets deployed in space we wouldn't need the explosions anymore.
Interesting that such space deployment can deny access to space to anybody else, and that means that any competitive superpower has to rush to deploy similar scale system of their own. Space race v2.
1 reply →
I think the Colossus[1] predated the ENIAC but is still in line with your general theme of doing stuff for the military. In this case it was used for cipher breaking, not firing calculations.
You could argue that it doesn't really count though because it was only turing complete in theory: "A Colossus computer was thus not a fully Turing complete machine. However, University of San Francisco professor Benjamin Wells has shown that if all ten Colossus machines made were rearranged in a specific cluster, then the entire set of computers could have simulated a universal Turing machine, and thus be Turing complete."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer
> You could argue that it doesn't really count though because it was only turing complete in theory
Then you have to also count the Z3 which predates the Colossus by 2 years.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)
Yes, but isn't that pretty much the point of the person you replied to? We know that a lot of inventions were motivated by that, and so it is incredibly myopic to not pause and try to think through the likely far broader implications.
OK, so what are they?
Scaling photovoltaic production doesn't seem likely to have many broader implications on its own. At best, it makes it easier to change the grid to renewable power, if you ignore the intermittency problem that still exists even at huge scales. PV fabs aren't really reusable for other purposes though, and PV tech is pretty mature already, so it's not clear what scaling that up will do.
Scaling rocketry has several fascinating implications but Elon already covered many of them in his blog post.
Scaling AI - just read the HN front page every day ;)
What are we missing here? Some combinatoric thing?
Yes, but as Ron Perlman famously said in the beginning of Fallout, "War never changes".
I would be more shocked that we eliminated war than if we achieved this version of Elon's future.
It makes sense to think that we will continue to make scientific progress through war and self defense.
Reason being, nothing is more motivating than wanting to survive
I'm starting to wonder if a person like Elon with his... morals... is who we want to be creating a vision for the future.
6 replies →
Not to go heads I win, tails you lose, but even if we go down this path - it's the same story because militaries are investing heavily in LLM stuff, both overtly and covertly. Outside of its obvious uses in modeling, data management, and other such things - there also seems to be a fairly widespread belief, among the powers that be, that if you just say the magic words to somebody, that you can make them believe anything. So hyper-scaling LLM potential has direct military application, same as Starlink and Starship.
1 reply →
The digital internet began with the telegraphy network in the early 1800s.
Many, many network protocols were developed and used.
> with the telegraphy network in the early 1800s.
Late 1700 actually, and war was indeed a key motivation for the deployment of the Télégraphe Chappe.
1 reply →
Really? That is so interesting - which ones? Any ancestors of commonly used ones today?
1 reply →
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?
This is a question that analysts don't even ask on earnings calls for companies with lowly earthbound datacenters full of the same GPUs.
The stock moves based on the same promise that's already unchecked without this new "in space" suffix:
We'll build datacenters using money we don't have yet, fill them with GPUs we haven't secured or even sourced, power them with infrastructure that can't be built in the promised time, and profit on their inference time over an ever-increasing (on paper) lifespan.
> This is a question that analysts don't even ask
On the contrary, data centers continue to pop up deploying thousands of GPUs specifically because the numbers work out.
The H100 launched at $30k GPU and rented for $2.50/hr. It's been 3 years since launch, the rent price is still around $2.50.
During these 3 years, it has brought in $65k in revenue.
5 replies →
> the useful lifespan of the gpus in 4-6 years. Sooo what happens when you need to upgrade or repair?
Average life of starlink satellite is around 4-5 years
damn. at this point its not even about a pretense for progress, just a fetish for a very dirty space
1 reply →
Same that happens with Starlink satellites that are obsolete or exhausted their fuel - they burn up in the atmosphere.
A "fully and rapidly reusable" Starship would bring the cost of launch down orders of magnitude, perhaps to a level where it makes sense to send up satellites to repair/refuel other satellites.
With zero energy cost it will run until it stops working or runs out of fuel, which I'm guessing is between 5-7 years.
5 to 7 months given they want 100kw Per ton and magical mystery sauce shielding is going to do shit all.
> Sooo what happens when you need to upgrade or repair?
The satellite deorbits and you launch the next one.
not to mention that radiation hardening of chips has a big impact on cost and performance
You could immersion cool them and get radiation resistance as a bonus.
1 reply →
So what are the other things? You said he glossed over them and didn't mention a single one.
Reliably and efficiently transport energy generated in space back to earth, for starters
Or let me guess, its going to be profitable to mine crypto in space (thereby solving the problem of transporting the "work" back to earth)
Overview energy has done interesting work in this area.
It's always better to generate electricity on the ground than attempt to beam it to the ground from space. The efficiency loss of beamed power is huge.
7 replies →
Why would you transfer the energy to earth? The energy powers ai compute = $
9 replies →
If we (as in "civilization") were able to produce that many solar panels, we should cover all the deserts with them. It will also shift the local climate balance towards a more habitable ecosystem, enabling first vegetation and then slowly growing the rest of the food chain.
for solar panels that are say 25% efficient, that means 75% of optical energy is turned into heat, whereas the sand had a relatively high albedo, its going to significantly heat up the local environment!
1 reply →
> But being able to pull if off implies an ability to do a lot more interesting things.
Those interesting things won't pump up the perceived value of Musk companies to stratospheric levels - or dare I say - to the moon. He needs the public to believe that to earn the trillion-dollar package from the Tesla-Twitter-SpaceX conglomerate, even if the latter turns out to be the only profitable arm of the conglomerate.
The data centers in space is 100% about Golden Dome,
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_syst...
Nope, it's 100% about building the stock valuation of SpaceX for an IPO in the face of significant risk from a cold war its CEO started on X with the U.S. federal government and increasing competition from Blue Origin, Quinfan and Guowang. DOD will play Bedrock vs Grok until there is feature parity and then make a decision not based on the features.
Disclaimer: Not an Elon hater, but far from a sycophant, similar to how I felt about Steve Jobs for 40+ years.
Exactly, this is about attaching the AI hype bubble to all of his dealings before he offloads with an IPO (that still leaves him with 75% of the stock).
You really can't grasp that GPUs scaled at this level is the most ambitious thing possible? That it will be the foundation of unfathomable technological innovation?
Will it, though?
Perhaps parent was being sarcastic.
[dead]
Honestly, there's not a lot else I can think of if your goal is find some practical and profitable way to take advantage of relatively cheap access to near-Earth space. Communication is a big one, but Starlink is already doing that.
One of the things space has going for it is abundant cheap energy in the form of solar power. What can you do with megawatts of power in space though? What would you do with it? People have thought about beaming it back to Earth, but you'd take a big efficiency hit.
AI training needs lots of power, and it's not latency sensitive. That makes it a good candidate for space-based compute.
I'm willing to believe it's the best low-hanging fruit at the moment. You don't need any major technological advances to build a proof-of-concept. Whether it's possible for this to work well enough that it's actually cheaper than an equivalent terrestrial datacenter now or in the near future is something I can't answer.
You don't need any major technological advances to build a proof-of-concept
You do - cooling those datacenters in space is an unsolved problem.
Sure it is, just not economically at that scale yet. But if Starship brings the cost to orbit down significantly, maybe.
We have radiators on the ISS. Even if you kept the terrible performance of those ancient radiator designs (regularly exposed to sunlight, simplistic ammonia coolant, low temperature) you could just make them bigger and radiate the needed energy. Yes it would require a bit of engineering but to call it an "unsolved problem" is just exaggerating.
2 replies →
Bezos has been pushing manufacturing-in-space for a long time, as a ideal candidate for what to do in space that you might prefer to not do on Earth. Robotics, AI automation, manufacturing - combo it in space, let the robots manufacture for us in space. Abundant energy, low concerns about most forms of pollution. We'll need to dramatically improve our ability to transit mass to and from cheaply first of course (we're obviously talking many decades into the future).
That is a fun thought experiment, as we wouldn't want to manufacture too far away from earth we may still be within the earth's atmosphere. I wonder what effect dumping greenhouse gases into the very upper levels of the atmosphere would have in comparison to doing it lower down. My assumption is it would eventually sink to a lower density layer, having more or less the same impact.
> Bezos has been pushing manufacturing-in-space for a long time, as a ideal candidate for what to do in space that you might prefer to not do on Earth. Robotics, AI automation, manufacturing - combo it in space, let the robots manufacture for us in space.
LOL, this seems so far off from the reality of what manufacturing looks like in reality. - sending raw materials up there - service technicians are necessary ALL THE TIME, in fully automated production lines - sending stuff back down
Maybe I lack vision, but data centers in space is a 1000x times better idea and that is already a terrible idea.
6 replies →
When Bezos first mentioned drone delivery, many intelligent, serious people laughed at it and accused of Bezos running out of ideas as Amazon was stagnant
Hate to say this, but manufacturing bitcoin would make the most sense. And hard to see how even that would work.
But everyone is crazy about GPU’s right now. Why not ride that wave for extra investment? All the benefits transfer to all the other things we can do with it.
And that's why the best way to use Superman's powers is in making him turn a giant crank
(yes I fully agree with you!)
We also shouldn't overlook the benefits we might realize if humanity achieved the incredible engineering and technical capacity necessary to make this version of porcine flight happen.
IDK, what about the side-benefits of applying the "incredible engineering and technical capacity" to something useful instead? Rather than finding rationalisations for space spambots.
This is such a hypebeast paragraph.
Datacenters in space are a TERRIBLE idea.
Figure out how to get rid of the waste heat and get back to me.
That's not a new problem that no one has dealt with before. The ISS for instance has its External Active Thermal Control System (EACTS).
It's not so much a matter of whether it's an unsolvable problem but more like, how expensive is it to solve this problem, what are its limitations, and does the project still makes economic sense once you factor all that in?
It's worth noting that the EACTS can at maximum dissipate 70kW of waste heat. And EEACTS (the original heat exchange system) can only dissipate another 14kW.
That is together less than a single AI inference rack.
And to achieve that the EACTS needs 6 radiator ORUs each spanning 23 meters by 11 meters and with a mass of 1100 kg. So that's 1500 square meters and 6 and a half metric tons before you factor in any of the actual refrigerant, pumps, support beams, valve assemblies, rotary joints, or cold side heat exchangers all of which will probably together double the mass you need to put in orbit.
There is no situation where that makes sense.
-----------
Manufacturing in space makes sense (all kinds of techniques are theoretically easier in zero G and hard vacuum).
Mining asteroids, etc makes sense.
Datacenters in space for people on earth? That's just stupid.
6 replies →
The ISS consumes roughly 90kW. That’s about *one* modern AI/ML server rack. To do that they need 1000 m^2 of radiator panels (EACTS). So that’s the math: every rack needs another square kilometer of stuff put into orbit. Doesn’t make sense to me.
9 replies →
It makes sense to target a higher operating temperature, like 375K. At some point, the energy budget would reach an equilibrium. The Earth constantly absorbs solar energy and also dissipates the heat only by radiative cooling. But the equilibrium temperature of the Earth is still kind of cool.
I guess the trick lies in the operating temperature and the geometry of the satellites.
Asking for a friend (who sucks at thermodynamics:) could you use a heat pump to cool down the cold end more and heat up the hot end much higher? Heat radiation works better the higher the temperature?
1 reply →
I agree that data centers in space is nuts.
But I think there's solutions to the waste heat issue
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/engineer...
The distinction is that what they are doing for Webb is trying to dissipate small amounts of heat that would warm up sensors past cryogenic temperatures.
Like on the order of tens or hundreds of watts but -100C.
Dissipating heat for an AI datacenter is a different game. A single AI inference or training rack is going to be putting out somewhere around 100kW of waste heat. Temps don't have to be cryogenic but it's the difference between chiselling a marble or jade statue and excavating a quarry.
That's a solution for minuscule amounts of heat that nevertheless disturb extremely sensitive scientific experiments. Using gold, no less. This does not scale to a crapton of GPU waste heat.
Just have to size radiators correctly. Not a physics problem. Just an economic one.
Main physics problem is actually that the math works better at higher GPU temps for efficiency reasons and that might have reliability trade off.
Anything is possible here, it's just there's no goddamn reason to do any of this. You're giving up the easiest means of cooling for no benefit and you add other big downsides.
It's scifi nonsense for no purpose other than to sound cool.
9 replies →
[dead]
All right, so how is it that all you geniuses out here are totally right about this, but all the dullards at SpaceX and XAI, who have accomplished nothing compared to you lot, are somehow wrong about what they do every day?
I know being right without responsibility feels amazing but results are a brutal filter.
I once had a job mopping floors and was quite successful at it, even if I say so myself. Based on my experience, do you think it is reasonable for me to claim that I will eventually develop techniques for cleaning the oceans of all plastic waste? Folks are criticizing the pie in the sky claims, not that they can do anything at all.
Seems a bit of both. But no disparagement to your floor mopping (as I once was a dishwasher in a commercial kitchen myself), but there's a big gap between cleaning a floor, or a dish, and creating frontier models and spaceships.
That said: I think solar is niche, and a moon-shot for how they want it. Nuclear is the future of reliable energy for human civilization.
I think the K-scale is the wrong metric. I don't think we should be trying to take all the sun's energy as a goal (don't blot out the sun! don't hide it in a bushel!), or as a civilizational utiltiy - I'm sure better power supplies will come along.
2 replies →
When a cultist hits you with their side of, ahm, facts, it invariably ends up being some kind of a logical fallacy. Is there a name for this phenomenon?
In this case it is the "how we dare not trusting all the experts at spaceX."
But even the fallacy itself is applied incorrectly, as we hear zero from anyone else other than the cult leader himself.
This vision doesn't come from those great engineers, but from Elon, the guy who promised Hyperloop, FSD in 2 years 10 years ago, and lots of other BS
spacex is one thing but xai accomplished what? the most racist csam prone llm?
I'm not aware of this - What's that?
2 replies →
There's no reason to think the brilliant minds at SpaceX are supportive of focusing their mission in any manner-what-so-ever on datacenters in space. You can't call on their genius as the supportive argument accordingly.
I disagree, I think the idea of a cabal of reactionary comrades inside SpaceX is activist fantasy. I think SpaceX only does what it does with full committment of its people: mind, body, spirit.
3 replies →
This place has derangement syndrome unfortunately. Such pessimists, it’s a bit sad