Comment by piloto_ciego
10 hours ago
Honestly, I think he's spot on, and I normally am not fond of Elon's public behavior. I mentioned in another thread that they're getting around having to ask permission to build datacenters by doing it in space. The entire thing is to avoid NIMBY stuff I'd bet.
It really depends on scale. There will be enough terrestrial vetoes that if what we build is 10-1000x what people are already halting through legal challenges…
I doubt it. Like, I hate to have to be the bearer of bad news, and maybe it’s my weird arctic anarchist soul, but, the old world order, the need for these companies to follow rules at least in spirit? That’s dead now. There are no laws but the laws of physics and the the laws others force your organization to follow.
I recognize that that is distressing to people, hell, it’s been obvious to me since I was at OWS in my 20s. But we are in a new world now and the old rules don’t apply. A company that has the backing of the government to launch their spacecraft will simply do it. You think Texas is going to stop them? Or Florida? Or even California? Of course not.
A lot changes in a world where you can plan things out with AI. A lot changes in a world with abundance. If we play our cards right we could have the culture, but that means letting go of the conservative yearning to put things back to how they were. The old world is 10 light years away now, it wasn’t as great as we remember it and it ain’t coming back.
And if I had to choose, I’d much rather have datacenters in orbit than one burning hydrocarbons loudly 2 blocks from my kids’ school.
> the old world order, the need for these companies to follow rules at least in spirit? That’s dead now
Pendulums swing. Anyone advocating for the development of more advanced technologies should be in favor of a system of fair laws enforced robustly. One need only look to countries that lack this foundation to understand why.
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> And if I had to choose, I’d much rather have datacenters in orbit than one burning hydrocarbons loudly 2 blocks from my kids’ school.
Yeah, but that choice is nonsense. Mandate that datacenters on the ground are on 100% green power and quiet, and they'll still be way way more cost effective than the orbital option.
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It would be orders of magnitude cheaper to buy up islands and space in countries that don't care, and then find ways to connect them to the required infrastructure, than it would be to build them in space.
Hell, it would be cheaper to figure out how to build them on the ocean.
I think Prospera and its kerfuffles with Honduras put a definitive end to the "islands" idea.
Governments can change and the next one may be very unfriendly. "Rich gringos/infidels/colonizers are abusing our land sold for sordid money" is a very efficient populist call almost everywhere on the planet.
How do you cool them?
https://www.chaotropy.com/why-jeff-bezos-is-probably-wrong-p...
Admittedly it is not my field, but back of the envelope calculations in a sun synchronous orbit with the radiators pointed towards deep space seem pretty plausible with about 1.3 to 1.7 ratio of solar area to radiator area.
Like, it's not "great" but if you're not flying around the sun every 72 minutes or whatever and you can keep your panels sun on and radiate into deep space, the numbers aren't bananas.
Also, you have to iradiate towards a space area which is not occupied by Earth. Ideally you go to Lagrange points with the datacenter but not around the earth.
Is that ratio just for collecting the sun's energy. Or does it include using it?
But you need a lot of fluid or gas to move the heat in that radiator system, whereas solar has the benefit of extremely efficiently moving power around at great distances through wiring or integrated bus bars.
And you need to get the heat away from the central point to the extremities of the radiator as much as possible. So you can maximize how much energy can be radiated away.
Seems like the weight of the system would be an issue with whatever gas or liquid you used to fill those radiators, but maybe I'm wrong...
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https://youtu.be/FlQYU3m1e80
"Is It Really Impossible To Cool A Datacenter In Space?" - Scott Manley
tl;dr -> not impossible.
Yeah, that was kind of a surprise. I always thought heat would be the big show stopper, but apparently not.
You can build a completely self-powered (and water-free) datacenter in the middle of nowhere for far cheaper than the satellite version. The NIMBY factor isn't so powerful as to keep datacenters off entire continents. Going to space for that is very stupid.
You still have to ask someone permission on the ground. It’s not about the money.
Yes, someone. Just a couple have to say yes out of so so many municipalities.
So I'll just say the same sentence again. The NIMBY factor isn't so powerful as to keep datacenters off entire continents.
now scale it ti 1 terrawatt
Building datacenters in a medium where the main waste product (heat) is incredibly difficult to get rid of, there is zero opportunity for maintainance, and the fuel to get to site costs more than the site does. Makes perfect sense, spot on!
Does the fuel cost that much? Just doing some back of the napkin doesn't seem to bear that out. Looks like the fuel load is about $2M, and gets you 100 tons to orbit. I think an inference-optimized NVL72 GB300 rack costs around 3x that, >$6M. That thing eats about 150kw, call it 10 pallets of 30 500W solar panels. Each pallet's about a ton, and costs about $10k. Let's be conservative and say the radiator's about the same weight. In reality, they're not going to be using commercial panels with heavy glass facing designed to resist hail, so should be better than this.
But anyway, conservatively, about 20 tons each, it seems like you could fit at least 5 of these per starship, assuming it's weight and not volume limited. Doesn't seem like fuel's a prohibitive portion of the cost here. But if they can't get it to their no-refurb-between-launches target, then that might be a significant part of the cost.
The model 3 was Elons last great idea (if it was even his). Since then, he has been wrong pretty much about everything.
Its to the point where anything he says is guaranteed to be wrong just on the merit that its coming out of his mouth.
Starlink?
Starlink wasn't technically Musks, Space X acquired a few companies IIRC. It also was developed around 2016, before Musk went crazy.