Comment by sheepscreek
1 day ago
What’s there not to like? Superconductors. Free electricity. No cooling necessary.
Put those three together and maybe it’s possible to push physics to its limits. Faster networking, maybe 4x-5x capacity per unit compared to earth. Servicing is a pain, might be cheaper to just replace the hardware when a node goes bad.
But it mainly makes sense to those who have the capability and can do it cheaply (compared to the rest). There’s only one company that I can think of and that is SpaceX. They are closing in on (or passed) 8,000 satellites. Vertical integration means their cost-base will always be less than any competitor.
> No cooling necessary.
This is false, it's hard to cool things in space. Space (vacuum) is a very good insulator.
3 are ways to cool things (lose energy):
In space, only radiation works, and it's the least efficient of those 3 options.
> In space, only radiation works
it's worse, incoming radiation also works to heat up objects that are in sunlight and in space. And you want to be in sunlight for the solar panels.
This is why surface of the moon is at temperatures of -120C when it's night and +120C when it's day there.
And the sun's radiation also flips bits.
Yes, it's technically possible to work around all of these. There are existing designs for radiators in the shade of the solar panels. Radiation shielding and/or resistant hardware. It's just not even close to economic at datacentre scale.
Superconductors.
Magnets.
(We're just saying random physics things right?)
7 replies →
[dead]
Do you mean to suggest that computer hardware does not need to be cooled when it is in space? Or that it is trivial and easier to do this in space compared to on Earth? I don’t understand either claim, if so.
The computer hardware only needs to run enough AI compute to be smart enough to convince Musk that it's working. It should be fine.
Superconductors. Average temperature in space is around 4 K.
Even assuming that this la-la-land idea has merit, the equilibrium temperature at the Earth's orbit is 250 Kelvin (around -20C). The space around the Earth is _hot_.
3 replies →
you do know about the Sun? Earth? and the Moon? where would you get this 4 kelvin?
Why is there no cooling necessary?
Space is cold - 4 K. Superconductors.
Repeating the word "superconductor" does not convince anyone of anything.
2 replies →
Space is not cold. Space is not hot either. Temperature is a property of matter. Empty space does not have a temperature. It is also a perfect insulator for conduction and convection, and as for radiation: it's a problem because of the sun heating up objects via its radiation.
This is the basics, I'm not an expert. But I don't think that you have anything useful at all to say here.
Do you know the lifespan of those satellites? Do you know how many of those fall out (sorry, de-orbited) of space every year?
Do you know the cost of sending up a payload of them?
Do you know how much $$ you need to extract from those payloads to make the cost of sending them up make sense?
Do you know how much they've lied about Starlink revenue and subscription counts?
Your exuberance for this topic is only matched by your lack of understanding about it.