Elon should do I it. Really. Either we get to see what noone understands yet: How economically viable server cooling at scale in space looks like or we see Elon faceplant financially yet again.
Either way, we win.
Just a reminder, while they speak of data centers in space, their proposed satellite is actually more like a single server rack in space.
It’s always misleading, you can’t even trust their choice of words.
Democrats immediately win three of the four seats on the Moon and sweep the Sky Council.
We can also launch Elmo into space and… Well, just forget about him, good riddance
Instead of shipping an entire data center to space, let’s ship a single Elon instead.
This leaves more room for fish to thrive.
Probably move them to a data center friendly state?
Idaho, please. Put them all in Idaho.
>Put them in Idaho
>Grow potatoes beside them
>AI gains sentience and actual intelligence
>Thinks potatoes are God
Potaitoes
What if…… we didn’t put them anywhere
Vacuum does not vent heat.
This has been a PSA.
Vacuum does not vent heat.
my Dyson gets pretty warm.
Begrudging upvote
No but hot things will just radiate it away, regardless of vacuum.
Yes, but the infrared radiators for a single megawatt are apx the size of 4 tennis courts. Until there’s a space elevator, that’s a tremendous amount of resources to get into orbit.
Yea, because the only resources in the entire universe are only on our planet. There’s absolutely none out there where there’s little to no gravity well to fight against right?
Sure, but we’re not doing anything to mine or manufacture in space.
And we can’t, until we do.
True enough.
I eagerly await OP’s space mining operations, which Elon has promised to start doing for a decade but simply hasn’t because he just didn’t wanna.
Still kinda blows my mind that a ship could accelerate to 1c and still not be able to use cooling fins, aircraft on earth use it as part of the design process
no worries about the temperature if the ship collides with a spec of spacedust :)
Please, waste your money on something that needs several football fields big heat radiators per gigawatt. And cannot replace a hard drive without launching a technician into space.
Easy, just tell the AI to change the harddrive!
Skynet, the clue is in the name.
Wow. He really is as dumb as I thought. As much as I would appreciate him investing the kind of money that would be required to orbit a viable data center into things humanity actually needs, I would also be perfectly happy witnessing him blow hundreds of billions on a fruitless project. Dumb shit doesn’t even understand basic physics and thermodynamics. It just demonstrates how he is an “ideas man” while actual smart people carry him on their shoulders. Wish he would just fuck off to mars already.
While he’s not smart enough to understand what a tough problem cooling servers in space would be, at least some of the engineers working on it might invent some interesting technology while failing to build a datacenter in space. Which is more than I can say about his other expenses like failing to buy elections, or failing to only have sons.
or failing to only have sons
Soo, he thougt his genes are “stronger” or something like it? This would be another failing to understand how things work.
If I remember correctly he had all his kids via IVF and selected for XY only.
Yep. Figuring out data centers in space is pretty much a prerequisite for any sort of significant transorbital flight. Unless we want to be limited to dinky little 2-3 person capsules that fit in a garage, efficient cooling in space will be necessary.
Figuring out data centers in space is pretty much a prerequisite for any sort of significant transorbital flight
I don’t think that’s true. They seem like two separate problems.
AI datacenters use power at such magnitudes that trying to solve the cooling problem for that kind of satellite or ship might not be all that applicable to a ship occupied by living humans.
A data center satellite might be able to run hot to improve cooling characteristics. The Stefan-Boltzmann law makes radiators much more effective at higher temperatures. So maybe the solution there would involve building out chips and server components that can run hot, like above 90°C, with cooling systems designed to operate at those higher temperatures.
Meanwhile, it might be that the human occupied space stations will need to have temperatures that support human life, closer to 18°C. At the same time, why would a human occupied space station need megawatts of power, and the accompanying need to reject megawatts of waste heat?
Well, let’s do some quick napkin math– Background (Google searches) (1) Per capita global energy consumption is 22000kwh/yr, which is ~8kw (2) ISS runs on 75-100kw for a crew of ~7 or so (3) S9G reactor for Virginia class sub generates 210MW for a crew of 134 (4) Average US household comes out to ~1.5kw in electricity alone
So. If we’re setting an arbitrary limit of 10MW, that means we are limited to (1) a population of 1000, (3) a population of 7ish, (4) a population of ~6000
I’m going to discount (4) entirely, because that ignores the non-electrical energy consumption which would still have to be done with electricity in space.
Note that every other case also doesn’t cover the entire energy cost of living, because the per capita average and the ISS average doesn’t include growing food, which is free solar power on earth, and specifically case (1) is significantly buffered by people worldwide that use minimal/no power due to having a planet that handles life support for them. Nuclear sub is probably not a great comparison either, because it’s designed to operate in combat conditions and never be refueled. But they are pretty much entirely self-sufficient outside of food.
ISS is probably the best comparison, assuming regular shipments of supplies and no industry. That gives us a rough population of 60-100 per megawatt. I did specify “significant” and “transorbital”, meaning we can’t assume consistent supply shipments. So let’s cut that number in half (random guess), and we have a population of 30-50 per megawatt. Now, there are people that live in villages of 30-50 people, but those villages often rely on infrastructure and industry of larger towns. You can’t really just find a field and plant corn in space. Every space habitat is going to need some sort of industry to make it economically viable. That means workers, that means more power. Let’s guesstimate that we cut the viable population in half again. 15-25 people per megawatt. Now I think this is a viable assumption given the disparity between household consumption (say half your power is electrical, so life support is 2-3kw) and per capita consumption (which divides total power consumption, industry included, giving another 5-6kw per capita to industry).
Smallest town that had productive industry I’ve ever lived in had a population of ~10,000, with about 1500 of those people employed in the factory. Given above napkin math at 15-25p/Mw, which is 40-60kw/person, that puts us at 400-600MW of power for a self sufficient habitat/space ship capable of supporting a population of 10k. Given that the small town I just referred to has a total power consumption of 187MW, we get that same factor of roughly 4x we came up with above.
So for a future space station analogous to Rural Bumfuck, East Nowhere (pop. 10,000) were looking at half a gigawatt of juice. That’s a lot of thermal energy.
Also, S-B law works in kelvin so going from 18C to 90C is only a 33%(^4) increase. Any reasonable space radiator at that point would likely have a multiple coolant loop system. Heck, I’d expect it to be the reverse of current nuclear design, with heat being dumped into a molten salt loop that goes into the radiators themselves at hundreds if not thousands of degrees.
Primary energy use per capita is a good discussion to have about our footprints on earth, but they include significant inefficiencies that simply wouldn’t be present on a spacecraft.
First, on Earth, we consume a lot of energy on transportation. There’s not really an analogue in the spaceship side of things, except maybe the spaceship’s own propulsion. Even then, though, most propulsion technology wouldn’t generate all that heat in the spacecraft itself, so there’s no need to cool an equivalent amount of energy used.
Second, we use a lot of energy making our living spaces habitable, with heating and cooling. Using proper reflection and radiation and shielding and all that can help keep a spaceship a comfortable temperature without spending as much energy as would be required to heat or cool a residence on the Earth’s surface.
Third, with Earth statistics, we talk of primary energy usage, which includes a lot of wasted energy. Thermal power plants tend to have less than 50% thermal efficiency, and fuel-burning heat engines tend to have less than 30%. That waste heat is part of the global energy consumption stats in a way that wouldn’t need to be factored in for a solar panel powered spaceship, because there’s not an equivalent source of excess waste heat.
So I think when you look at individual energy usage, you’ll see there are literally multiple orders of magnitude difference between different individuals with different lifestyles, even within the same developed economy. A population who never leaves the confines of the ship doesn’t have to budget energy for transportation (28% of the world’s energy usage), heating and cooling buildings (25% of the world’s energy use), or anything like most of the industrial sector.
For things like cooking or heating water, there may need to be major qualitative differences in order to support a living arrangement in a ship (more enclosed cooking appliances like pressure coolers or microwaves, fewer stoves that emit waste heat all around).
And agriculture is of course the big problem. But we wouldn’t be able to naively assume that the energy use per food calorie produced would be within an order of magnitude. Photosynthesis is really inefficient. So is the whole growing of an entire plant to focus on the parts of the plant that we eat. There may need to be some form of synthetic food, or partially synthetic food, that creates edible macronutrients without a biological feedstock.
But that’s a separate problem. I still don’t think that solving habitable spaceship cooling requirements will necessarily overlap with solving space data center cooling requirements.
I think the opposite. But we’ll get to that.
First, let’s eliminate transportation. Cool. Done. Now, every space station/space ship is entirely self sufficient, in a contained civilization sense. Go back to that company in a small town I referenced (I worked a contract there for a bit): those 1500 people are producing a pretty basic, but very specific doohickey that exists in pretty much every building we’ve built since the 70s. That production facility represents ~40% of the global market share. Now it is a basic doohickey, so there’s only six separate production lines that feed into the final doohickey. And each building has hundreds, if not thousands of similar specific doohickeys. Spaceships would be more complicated, so let’s just assume a thousand similar doohickeys, six production lines feeding in, one person per production line and were up at 6000 factory workers. Given the previous ratio of 17:3 of population to workers, our minimum theoretical station population size just expanded to 40,000. Multiply previous estimate for 10k by 4. And that’s not considering the feedstocks-one of those production lines was essentially just CNC machines…but they bought barstock iron. That’s another production line. Oh, and the iron has to come from somewhere, so we’re talking mining operations. New limitation: we can only build on asteroids that have ample supply of every mineral resources we need. Plus, each one of those production lines means more spare parts means more production lines. We lose all economy of scale. Minimum population goes up again.
Second, I’ve lived in a lot of places on earth, and even the least hospitable ones, like when I was in the northern USSR or down in Mexico, you had 3-4 months out of the year where you could just open the windows and switch off the heat/cooling. You don’t get that in space. And we see this with the ISS, too. A power system of ~84-120kw supports a crew of ~7 plus or minus a few. I’m guessing most of that power goes to life support. Compared to the power I draw in my house, that implies that living on a habitable planet offsets roughly 80% of the power expenditure for life support.
Third, that’s why I’m comparing primarily household consumption to the ISS. I draw a bit over a kw, and the ISS draws about 10 per person. Thermal losses happen upstream of that. I’m sure the iss solar panels (and solar panels also deal with thermal losses which might now be less than 50%, but last I seriously looked into it were 66% with perovskite cells) are actually exposed to significantly more power than their 240kw max output.
And yes, there are orders of magnitude in difference between the poorest and the richest on earth. This is why I think the 8kw number per capita is actually a low estimate. The difference being that building a dirt house in a prairie is more than adequate life support on earth. Can’t really build a space shack out of sod and expect to do much living in it. I addressed the need for transportation earlier. Matter of fact, one of the theories for why neanderthals died out while modern humans survived is because we did trade and they didn’t figure out transportation.
Cooking, water cycling, etc is already figured in. The ISS does cooking and water heating perfectly fine. Agriculture also wouldn’t be that big of a problem, actually. You just need to build a greenhouse and add a cooling system to account for the increased heat gain of having a greenhouse on your ship. I guess you’ll want some backup grow lights for going past the asteroid belt.
My point is that cooling requirements are cooling requirements. Whether you’re cooling down GPUs or you’re cooling down people, the only question is one of scale. How many GPUs do you need to cool, and how many people do you need to cool? Right now, we can cool off half a dozen, maybe a dozen people on a ship. Having that be the upper limit for space populations means we aren’t going to space in any significant way, indefinitely. If we want to have even small space stations of a few thousand people, we will need to solve a cooling problem comparable in magnitude to a data center in space.
Personally, I’m okay with Google or whatever spending their R&D budget on it. Government grants have been gutted enough, let Google burn cash on it and then put the cheap Chinese knockoff on your future spaceship.
Wow. He really is as dumb as I thought.
He’s a con artist.
Exactly. Once the data center in space idea inevitably flames out, he’ll come up with some new bullshit “vision” that the rubes will lap up just as eagerly.
Nature is efficient, and he is only as smart as someone with effectively infinite means needs to be.
Has anyone actually tried a genuine rollout of data centers? Eg no lying about bringing in jobs, no cheating the energy grid, no building loud data centers near homes, don’t paint people as idiot luddites for opposing AI.
I wonder how different sentiments about data centers would be if the people building them weren’t pathological. Probably not good, but having a punkass showman leading the way seems like self-sabotauge.
People have been building them normally for decades. They just used to be regular industrial buildings in industrial-zoned areas and required only minor grid upgrades.
The scale of the new stuff makes it pathological. You cant be a good guy if your hyperscaler is the size of a small town and uses as much power and water as a state.
Kind of a double fuck in these rollouts at the moment. 1. Is the reckless build out. All the things you mentioned. 2. Is the explicit goal of using to shoot working class power, and create “algorythimc governace” and “ubiquitous policing”.
Its a sinister combo
This is how it was most of the time for decades before the LLM/transformer model FOMO speculative investment
As someone from a highly industrial area, it was not.
In countries where the government is responsible and new data centers have to go through the regulatory consent process and address the public’s concerns around noise levels, water usage and grid prices there is still opposition from the public. I think* because of how big of an issue it is in America. America is a megaphone to a lot of the world so the issues spill over and the average person doesnt really seem to know what they’re mad about.
An utterly unworkable, absurdly costly idea. I’m sure the same investor-lemmings who buy heavily into IPOs which have no viable business model will fall for this too.
Underwater data centers are also not that feasible, but they are a lot more feasible than putting one in space.
Yep. We already have to deal with waste heat on the ISS, where is the monstrous heat from even a traditional DC to go?
I want Elon Musk in space, aimlessly drifting around.
I would chip in $25 to send him to space, unless it was a two-way ticket.
Hilarious prank though. Send him into space, and then “accidentally” forget some of the heatshield.
Save money on weight, just send his head up.
He will do absolutely anything to not spend money on making the world he lives in a better place for all. So build a data center in space, just add a little apartment for yourself. Imagine looking down on the whole world! What power!
He’s counting on Mars. Which isn’t insane. He should go. We’re right behind him.
I’m still waiting on how he’s going to manage CMEs during spaceflight.
NASA timed its manned high-space missions to low-ebb periods, and there was still some risk of astronauts being baked to a crispy golden brown.
Getting to mars is nine months, rather than a few days to the moon. CMEs be coming.
Is there somewhere we can donate to help make sure he
fries in a coronal mess ejectionlives the dream he’s always wanted?With our current tech, a Mars mission pretty much 100% certain a one-way trip.
Common elon, wheres your “move fast and break stuff” spirit? Lets get you suited up and on a rocket asap!
Imagine how rapidly he could innovate on a constant acceleration vector out of the solar system!
For a man who keeps talking about colonizing Mars, Musk seems remarkably surprised that you can’t permanently colonize a state’s politics. Spending hundreds of millions on campaigns didn’t come with a warranty, and moving SpaceX again won’t change how voting works.
I doubt voting would be allowed on Mars if Musk gets his way.
oh no it would be allowed. but it would be designed similar to spaceX’s share policy. Voting is allowed as long as he personally either is indifferent or wants the change, but the second he doesn’t want the change his single vote will override the majority.
