Comment by user43928
1 month ago
Your idea is that because AI or data centers are supposedly 'entirely unprofitable', they want to expend even more capital to do it in space with less profit?
And somehow most of the replies seem to be about terrorism. What a comment section.
I'd expect the discussion to be a bit more focused on the scalability and solar power..
I think you are dramatically underestimating the terrorism concern. From public news reports we know almost 400 Flock cameras have been destroyed in acts of widespread grassroots criminal vandalism, and I am sure Flock knows the much higher true number. Likewise for Waymo, we know of at least half a dozen vehicles destroyed and at least two dozen temporarily disabled, and I am similarly sure Waymo knows the much higher true number. From the point of view of a data center executive who has chatted to a Flock or Waymo executive at a social event in the last few years, the risk of vandalism/terrorism is neither hypothetical nor plausible, but literally real and already happening.
I think you are dramatically overestimating it.
It's one thing to vandalize some cameras or a driverless car in your neighborhood.
Traveling to a large, potentially secured facility to commit terrorism is on another level.
It being inside a building it is also much more difficult to damage and the consequences would be far greater.
I'd think one would need strong motivations for such actions.
A protest seems much more realistic, but I did not even hear of protests at data centers yet, only a small one at OpenAI headquarters.
and "thermal radiation"
"But what about cooling?" is a tell-tale sign of people not knowing much about space systems and acting as experts.
Cooling in space is a solved problem for these designs, by construction. They start with existing, flight-proven systems that handle some N KW of heat rejection in space, and shape they payload to require less than N KW of heat, meaning they can technically use existing design as platform and swap out the payload (there is devil in the details around integration here).
That's why there's little weight in papers about this, and they instead focus on actually novel challenges (like operating ML hardware in high-radiation environments).
But yes, I too expected the discussion to be more substantial. As it is, we have a rehash from discussion on that "ML in space" paper from ~6 months ago, which solved thermals by construction and explained how this makes economic sense, and people 100% ignored that, and all comments were a mix of "it makes no economic sense" and "have they thought about how to cool it?".
*sigh*
"We know how to vent heat" and "we know how to vent enough heat that this becomes economical" are two different things. Can we deploy computers in space? Absolutely. Can we deploy a shitload of computers in space that are running extremely compute intensive tasks on a continuous basis?
1 reply →