I am just honestly confused. There seem to be no logical reason for it, except that it would raise the stock value of rocket producers like SpaceX and Blue Origin.
This idea is a total scam. This is just a way of asking investors for an enormous amount of money, with literally no intention of actually following through with it.
They might throw a couple of cheap satellites in orbit, just to say they “did it”…but no one with any actual comprehension of these things is honestly expecting it to yield results. The vast majority of that investment money, is going to be used for unrelated things.
In any sane world, this would be considered fraud. But, here we are.
Remember when Microsoft dumped containers of servers in the ocean to test things.
If they couldn’t make that work they obviously can’t make space work.
It was always a scam.
You’re talking about project Natick. All reports I saw was that it was actually a resounding success. The only reason I’ve seen for why it was cancelled is because it wasn’t able to be kept at the bleeding edge as they couldn’t upgrade the servers randomly. It doesn’t really compare to launching them into space which gives basically zero benefit but adds an insane amount to the cost.
Not only upgrading hardware, but maintaining any issues along the way. Hard drives fail, Memory fails, etc. That’s just stuff that happens and can be easily remedied in a normal data center.
Now take all of those issues, and instead of being underwater… move it 500 miles into the vacuum of space. And take the heat dissipation of all that water, and make it a fraction because the vacuum of space is terrible at radiating heat despite the ambient temperature being so cold.
Cosmic radiation causes random bit flips. You would have to shield everything and make it redundant. More power, more heat, more cooling, more power… Welcome to the loop.
Yeah… No maintenance… Which is a thing that datacenters require.
Enterprise Hardware can have redundancy but things still break.
If it was a success they would have done it. Ergo, not a success.
IDK about success.
I think it went predictably in that the cooling was ok but maintenance was an issue.
Seawater is a real bitch. If you could cool things with it we would just pump it onshore.
“resounding success” but given up as a bad idea.
The fact that it could possibly “work” was not really in question, it was whether it would be worth the costs and drawbacks. It was not.
But either way you are right, space even worse than water with no benefit compared to ocean.
The core reason space datacenters are uneconomical, is the 5 year replacement cycle. Includes trashing the solar and radiators every 5 years even if they could last 30+ because datacenter modules need to auto-deploy their own power and radiators. Ocean deployments would be far better. Wind/solar/batteries doesn’t need frequent change. Just drop in a new module every 5 years, while taking out the old one, and rebuilding its insides.
Nah nah, we aren’t allowed to do wind and solar anymore. The US president is paying a shitload of money to a lot of companies to stop them from developing renewables in the US and abroad.
The microsoft thing worked. It also highlighted a lot of issues that would also exists in space, but way worse.
But “genius billionaire buffoon” can’t read apparently.
It functioned, mostly, but I wouldn’t say it worked.
Microsoft? Hahaha. Like Microsoft would know shit about doing anything in space?
While Elon has no issues crashing and burning, no matter how many times it takes, until he succeeds… That’s a true commitment to trial and error!
I wish you could make money off of nowing when a company is spouting bullshit, but after watching Tesla stock for a decade…
I believe Apartheid Pedo cited space being cold as a reason (ie don’t have to worry about cooling the servers), except as usual he’s a fuckwit with no idea what he’s talking about. Space is empty, which means there’s nothing to carry heat away, so the only way to lose heat is via radiation. And that takes forever.
Yeah I think space stations have to literally worry about not radiating enough heat away. If there is no medium to transfer the heat into the heat can’t really go away. One of the many unintuitive features of space
To the point that they occasionally have to use the solar panels to shade the radiators.
Thermals in space are difficult
We can just terraform space duh
Falcon Heavy with a shitload of ice cubes
There’s no reason, Musk is just bullshiting like with Mars colony by 2025.
This. I don’t know how any supports is companies. This man has the attention span of a cocker spaniel on Ketamine.
He just says stupid shit all the time and people are supposed to pretend this it’s a wise business decision.
BS is fair, 90% of it. There needed to be an excuse for xAI merger is origin of the BS.
No, it seems like you understand it perfectly.
It’s a shameless attempt to loop in their own assets to a free for all money spree. There is literally nothing about it that makes any sense. It would be more efficient to beam laser light back to earth to power a dc than this, and that’s a stupid idea too.
It’s a terribly inneficient idea, but it sounds futuristic, which is basically what Elon trades on to acquire government subsidies and investor buy-in.
The tech billiionaires got annoyed by regulations and complaints and are looking for a easier way.
We towed it outside the environment.
Into another environment, no?
Meanwhile China is putting them underwater for passive cooling.
They do? MS tried too, but too much issues with marine life, corrosion and accessibility for repairs/replacement. With the third also being a issue with space, but x100.
Saw this awhile back and kinda rolled my eyes. I see the appeal of the idea, but the execution seems unnecessarily complicated for little gain. The space one is even worse, the sheer amount of fuel to lift that kind of weight is just a stupid waste.
that the water footprint of datacentres could reach 9.3tn litres by 2030 – enough to service the annual domestic water needs of all 1.3 billion residents of sub-Saharan Africa.
And then they wonder about the spike in climate warming, with water vapor being one of the most effective greenhouse gases.
It was an interesting experiment for certain but it’d be easier overall I think to make a desalinization plant to produce more water specifically for the data center to cool with.
Snake oil. As almost everything else.
They’re harder for us to burn to the fucking ground if we can’t reach them.
You answered half of your own question.
“it would raise the value of rocket producers like SpaceX and Blue Origin.”
The other thing is a complete lack of jurisdiction. At least theoretically, nobody can go after them for generating grossly illegal content in space.
Also, pure hypermasculine fetishism.
Because it sounds like “future” to stupids.
As stated elsewhere it’s a scam but their stated reason is because they want to build massive data centres on earth but there’s a huge backlog in getting electricity for them. Even generating their own electricity is troublesome because every single natural gas/methane turbine is already spoken for years into the future and solar etc takes a lot of land which they may have trouble getting the rights to build on. Thus, if you could build in space you can theoretically collect a lot more solar and more strongly than what you get on the planet’s surface. It just ignores all the other costly parts but I guess if you are being given unlimited money by venture capitalists what else are you going to promise them when they want more more more AI infrastructure
Solar on deserts, or even Nebraska farmland, is far more profitable than corn for ethanol and produces far more energy. Even with 2-5 hours of sunlight/day, battery systems, would be 5x cheaper in Nebraska than space for 24/7/365 power production, with perhaps minor throtling in winter. A datacenter in the middle of a solar farm also eliminates noise complaints from cooling systems.
Ding ding!
- It’s not better for cooling. - No air or water to dissipate heat.
- It’s not better for communication. - Beaming data is always more lossy than its physically connected counterpart.
- It’s not less expensive. - Just submerge it, or build closer to the poles with wind and solar to power it
Also, it throws more junk in our orbit, is more difficult to maintain and upgrade, and has a significantly more catastrophic fail result.
But why do things logically or sustainably when you* can make money?
* you = someone who already is hoarding a large portion of our wealth.
But then how do they make money out of it?
By scamming investors and fooling shareholders.
same way musk made a shitton of money with hyperloop: by getting other people to pay for it and then not actually do it.
So I can actually think of a few reasons: Preprocessing vast amounts of super high resolution satellite imagery to save bandwidth, and jurisdictional black site processing data some countries would want to steal or arrest you for having or processing, particularly if you were hiding it from internal audit. You would be paying an extreme premium over ground based for ever FLOP, so, the customer base of practical customers is limited to a handful of very well funded intelligence agencies or scientific projects in very niche use cases.
Like every other real “ai” use case:
This is fucking awful, and I hope there’s a hell so every single person involved can get some fraction of the suffering they deserve.
Good news: There is a hell!
If you’re gnostic it’s right here!
Admire the plug, to call that community hell is really something
How consistent is modern day gnosticism with that of the first/second centuries?
Oh no one of the threads most forms of Gnosticism gave in common is the idea that earth / corporeal existence is hell in the same way that the Buddha says all feeling is suffering. It’s like that bit in the good place where she realizes they’re actually in hell already.
Interesting! Thank you for sharing!
Another psycho christian who thinks eternal punishment is somehow loving.
Fuck off, death cultist.
I’m the same one you’ve been following the past few days, lol
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Solar energy is more efficient in space because there’s no atmosphere and depending on the orbit can be in the sun for much, much longer than on earth over the day. Apparently you can beam the energy down to earth somehow, but you lose something like 50%. So the solution is to put the data center up where you get the power. The downside is that it costs a fuckton to send it up, cooling becomes an issue, temperature gradients become an issue, heat and cold cycles as it goes from sun to the dark side of earth is an issue, and the funnest part is that cosmic rays can fry electronics like GPUs.
You can theoretically beam down energy with microwave… the problem is that it’s hard to concentrate and everything next to your receiver will burn
Seems fitting to have LLMs bring on the age of space death rays tbh
