Comment by db48x

> The Starlink v3 doesn't exist yet in space, it also needs Starship apparently

True but not really relevant. All prior versions of Starlink worked well enough, so there’s no reason to suspect that v3 won’t.

> … it will have the size of a Boeing 737 fully deployed. So it will not be small…

Irrelevant. Size is a weird measure here. You should ignore it because it is a marketing thing. All that is meant by it is that once the solar panels are extended they span a distance larger than the wingspan of a 737, nothing more. A Starlink v3 satellite has far less mass, interior volume, or complexity than a 737. I could get a long 30m rope and tell you that it was “larger than a 737”, but you wouldn’t be very impressed.

> A rack with 48u will either have 12 or 24 GPUs which equals to 9kW or 17kW. Than its not 250k satellites for a 'small' 300MW DC but only 25k. Still a very crazy number.

Are you sure? That fits within the estimated power budget of a Starlink v3, but I was assuming that GPUs were denser than that these days. I’m not an expert though. I figured a rack would hold somewhere between 96 and 128 GPUs depending on whether they had to be in 3u or 4u servers. They would need between 60kw and 90kW of power, and would need a modest radiator. The solar panels would be far larger than the radiator.

> I would love to see all of this scifi stuff happening. Spaceship in space, travel gates, dyson sphere but there is just no current breakthrough in our society which would indicate that this makes sense.

Ok, see, your problem is that you haven’t properly distinguished between different types of fiction. You put those three things in one category as if they were all equally fictional, but that cannot be true.

The first one is ambiguous, since the Space Shuttle was definitely a “spaceship in space”, so perhaps you just mean FTL travel like in Star Trek or Star Wars. By “travel gates” I assume you mean something like the eponymous gates from Stargate SG–1. Those are both ruled out by the laws of physics, and we can only tell stories about them because people willingly suspend their disbelief. Campbell said that a true science fiction story can only include one thing that requires the reader to suspend their disbelief. If it includes more than that then it is a fantasy instead.

But a Dyson sphere, or more accurately a Dyson swarm, is not an impossibility at all. If I can put one solar–powered satellite in orbit around the sun then if I am really industrious I could put ten, or a hundred, or a trillion. As many as I wanted and could afford, right? The laws of physics don’t say that a sun can only have 8 satellites around it, or any other number. Dyson knew that enough such satellites would eventually blot out the sun. They would absorb all the sunlight it could emit, and then the satellites would all emit infrared waste heat. If all of those satellites were doing something useful then whoever put them there would have a lot of useful work being done at their command. Even if it’s just trillions of GPUs making AI–powered cat memes, or simulating the minds of a bunch of human uploads, or even if they’re all just mirrors to redirect that light somewhere else, that’s a lot of power at our command. It is fictional only because it is an idea that nobody has actually gotten around to implementing yet. Once we’ve done it then it won't be fictional anymore.

> Its just so much more expensive than just doing it in a dessert and putting fibre and solar panels and batteries there.

No one here is arguing that it isn’t. It might still be cheaper to build datacenters on Earth. But most of the people who say that it’s _definitely_ still cheaper to build them on Earth are overestimating the difficulties, and therefore the costs, of doing it in orbit instead. We’re getting to the point where launch costs are low enough that it is no longer a given that it is cheaper.

For one thing, actually building things in the desert is expensive. You have to build all the necessary infrastructure yourself. Roads, power, water, fuel, etc, etc. You might as well be launching everything into space! No, if you want it to be cheaper you need to build somewhere closer to home, like Ohio.