Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

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Data centres will not be moving to space. The physics and economics don't work.

It's not that it can't be done at all, but heat dissipation at scale in space is an insane engineering challenge, the tech to make giant radiators work doesn't exist yet, and even if it did it would extremely costly to develop and deploy.

Musk is a textbook narcissist. His consistent pattern is to make grandiose promises - literal future faking - fulfil a small percentage of them, then make even bigger and more grandiose promises and hope investors have a short memory. (They do.)

As a narcissist his primary relationship orientation is contempt for others. He's more interested in damaging projects he doesn't like - like the left-leaning community on the original Twitter, using promises of Hyperloop to kill high speed rail, ignoring the CSA from Grok, and of course the USAid fiasco - than seeing through the projects he claims to be developing to completion.

He fits in perfectly with Thiel, Altman, and the rest. The tech is sometimes interesting, but the alignment is fundamentally hostile to the rest of humanity.

> but heat dissipation at scale in space is an insane engineering challenge, the tech to make giant radiators work doesn't exist yet, and even if it did it would extremely costly to develop and deploy

Different problem.

Cooling can be done in space, it's a normal problem; not easy, nothing in space is easy, but on the scale of space it is normal.

However, at the temperature you would run a chip at, a radiator you make for space will just work better, reject more heat, if you leave it on the ground.

We get convective cooling down here as well as radiative. At operational temperature, convection more than makes up for the atmosphere being a heat bath at ~20 C or whatever.

Everything is possible. Doesn't mean you should do it. You can also put datacenters on the sea floor in a nuclear submarine. That might be even easier.

But does it make sense to do it?

No.

> t's not that it can't be done at all, but heat dissipation at scale in space is an insane engineering challenge, the tech to make giant radiators work doesn't exist yet, and even if it did it would extremely costly to develop and deploy.

You are overstating the engineering difficulty. Starlink constellation already dissipates around 100MW.

If you solve your cooling problem in space by distributing 10000 servers across 100 orbits then you replace one engineering challenge with the next; good luck with the satellite-satellite optical crossbars, and even more with the time travel beam shapers to get the communication latency between the components of your "orbit-distributed data center" to-target.

(the sarcasm is intended; there are some usecases for "space servers", around stealth for sure; to "scale it like a terrestrial DC" though ... dunno; not matter how I turn it, it just seems crazy expensive)

Communication latency and bandwidth would present big issues for AI satellites used for training. But if they are inference-only, then the latency and bandwidth demands are much, much lower. Starlink already demonstrates the required parameters.

Indeed ... yet the servers for that already exist and are largely ground-based - "edge" compute of the large CDNs through which much of the internet's traffic flows anyway.

Will starlink build its own edge ? Maybe. We'll see. Whether it makes sense to have this infrastructure "colocated in space" if you're not also the owner of the "connection infrastructure in space" though? It'll come down to cost. If I were anyone else but SpaceX ... that's where my eyes would be.

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