Comment by jmyeet

1 month ago

There's no world where this makes sense. Let's take it issue by issue.

1. Hardware failures: If you know anything about data centers you know that servers fail all the time. I've seen estimates of AI DC servers that have a failure rate of about 9% annually. A terrestrial DC has hardware techs who get alerted to the failure, replace the bits with known good bits and then take the suspect bits for testing to either bin them or verify they're working. You have no option to economically do this in space;

2. Radiation: We have the atmosphere and a concrete box protecting ground-based servers from cosmic rays flipping bits as well as the potentially more problematic (in space) solar storms;

3. Power generation: solar is the only option and yes, orbital panels would be more efficient than ground based. But space-based solar solar tech is much more expensive than what we put here on Earth because it absorbs multiple wavelengths of light to generate electricity. The launch cost and weight savings overcome the high panel costs. But to generate power in the gigawatt range, you're talking about solar panel arrays far larger than anything we've ever deployed in space;

4. Cooling: this is a big one. The only way to get rid of heat is to radiate it away into space and this is bound by physics. I'm sure people have done the maths on this but it's not going to be pretty;

5. Heating: the sun will be heating your vessel a lot of the time. You can shield it to some degree with solar panels but they too will radiate away heat in all directions, which will heat the things behind them. JWST uses several sophisticated layers of cooling to reach the low temperatures it needs to operate; and

6. Interconnectivity: these things are likely to be tens of kilometers apart in the very least. You're going to need terabit level networking to be useful for coordination and even then latency will be an issue. Laser dispersion will be an issue as well as the power and heat generated.