Comment by elihu
11 hours ago
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.
It's a solved problem. The physics is simply such that it's really inefficient.
> ... we'd need a system 12.5 times bigger, i.e., roughly 531 square metres, or about 2.6 times the size of the relevant solar array. This is now going to be a very large satellite, dwarfing the ISS in area, all for the equivalent of three standard server racks on Earth.
https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...
The gist of it is that about 99% of cooling on earth works by cold air molecules (or water) bumping into hot ones, and transferring heat. There's no air in space, so you need a radiator 99x larger than you would down here. That adds up real fast.
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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.
Space manufacturing is a real thing, there are already companies trialling it. The factory is small, satellite sized, and it deorbits when the manufacturing run is done. The results are protected enough for them to be picked up from Earth.
The justification (today) is that you can do very exotic things in zero-G that aren't possible on Earth. Growing ultra-pure crystals and fibre optics and similar.
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Well you see, what you do is send a bunch of humanoid robots up there to do all the work.
(please don't ask what we do when those break down)
The show For All Mankind kind-of hinted at how the labor problem would be solved: recruit like the military and promise huge bonuses that will probably not be realized because space is risky business
I think it makes more sense if you invert the manufacturing cycle.
Automated asteroid mining, and asteroid harvesting, are potential areas where we have strong tech, a reasonable pure automation story, and huge financial upsides. Trillion dollar asteroids... If we’re sourcing metals out there, and producing for orbital operations or interplanetary shenanigans, the need for computing and automation up there emerges.
And I imagine for the billionaire investor class now is the window to make those kinds of plays. A whole set of galactic robber barons is gonna be crowned, and orbital automation is critical to deciding who that is.
>>sending raw materials up there
That's what asteroid mining is for.
>>service technicians are necessary ALL THE TIME
Optimus is already very well tele-operated. Even though over time it can likely be trained to do specific tasks far better than even humans.
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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.