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.
My theory is that it’s so they are beyond the reach of protesters, the law, etc. I think that is going to be a very in-demand property for servers going forward.
With the money that it costs to send an entire data center to space you can easily fortify and militarize your data center on earth to the extent that no protester will ever come close?
The law is anyway already largely under their control right? They don’t have to go to space to evade the law.
And to the extent that the law still applies to them and constraints then, doesn’t it also still apply to the necessary ground-based necessities for space based data centers? As in, if the state wants to shut them down, they can still do so?
necessary ground-based necessities for space based data centers?
They could be configured such that no off switch exists, no manual administration is required, and it’s a fully self-sovereign system that can only be shut down by sending a missile to space, and physically accessing it to extract the data or encryption keys it contains is even harder.
you can easily fortify and militarize your data center on earth to the extent that no protester will ever come close?
Only if your definition of “protester” excludes anyone using weaponized drones, but that misses the point. The current meta for fortifications right now clearly favors the attackers, and that’s especially going to be true for a facility requiring large power inputs. That meta no longer applies if your data castle is in space.
They could be configured such that no off switch exists
Power grid dependence can be a weak point. Democracy can clash with CIA/oligarchy. A big enough mob can overwhelm security forces not particularly ideologically aligned to defending skynet.
Shooting down satellites isn’t scifi anymore. Any medium sized country can do it if they want to.
Why don’t they already then? Russia could shoot down satellites providing communications to Ukrainian drones for instance, couldn’t they? I think it is because doing so triggers a large shitstorm and real geopolitical consequences, if it becomes the norm then no one will get to benefit from any satellites, so a smaller and less influential country is not getting off easy if they do that, same kind of deal as nukes and access to them except probably a little less so. The similarity being that there is a cutoff point below which no one has access, and above which heavy coercion and other manipulation can be imposed as an effective deterrent.
Mostly because it’s expensive and some satellites are in way higher orbit than you want to fire randomly at, and hitting just a few satellites is more of a very very expensive annoyance unless you’re doing it to time it with other strikes (and yes there’s also escalation risk, but countries without their own satellites won’t care much)
It’s a good point that providing the security systems of nuclear power plants is cheaper and more job creating than space datacenters. You can also get more uppity when international adversaries nuke your datacenter on US soil as opposed to space.
But more money to a guy that recycles $100m+ into politicians every election cycle, provides decision maker influence to subsidize space skynet. Continuity of nazi/zionazi ideology may require being beyond any temporary loss of control over law.
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.
Also, pure hypermasculine fetishism.
This is the weirdest take on data centers ever.
but … it checks out?
Snake oil. As almost everything else.
They’re harder for us to burn to the fucking ground if we can’t reach them.
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.
Because it sounds like “future” to stupids.
I feel like “data centers in spaaaaaaaace!” is an idea that could only come from someone completely removed from the day-to-day of how computers actually work. Like no matter how you slice it, these are physical objects that are going to need servicing by human beings fairly regularly. Putting them in space vastly complicates that process.
They can’t build datacenters on earth on time and in budget, it’s totally gunna be easier in orbit
Robots exist. They literally have robots that you can basically sync them to your movements. And you can control them with VR. So somebody on Earth can control a robot and fix that shit from Earth, if truly needed. I really doubt they would have any need for that though.
The plan is use modules just like starlink only they’re going to call them starmind, and the goal is a constellation of over a million of them. They’ll be in relatively low earth orbit and they will have relatively short lives and there will be a cadence to regularly replace them.
I’m sure you’ve seen how Elon likes to piss away money…
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.
Solar power and low latency laser communications.
Power is free* in space.
Communications between satellites is as fast as fast can be, fast enough that it can be faster to go earth-sat-sat-sat-earth than via fibre under the ocean.
The absolute con is that heat is really really hard to shed in space and it’s really really expensive to get big heavy things to space.
The absolute con is that heat is really really hard to shed in space and it’s really really expensive to get big heavy things to space.
The entire convo in one sentence.
Honestly I feel like a big issue is the physical security. Now your data center is more vulnerable to any orbit capable adversary.
Lasers are no longer low latency when distances are huge
Power may be accessible with solar panels, but power density is shit in space because solar panels force a flat design with limited depth, plus cooling issues, and you eventually need a construction so large that it’s incredibly fragile.
Lasers in space are speed of light in a vacuum which it considerably faster than speed of light in a fibre.
And then promptly loses out to the longer distance between nodes, slower network gear on the satellites themselves, the massive latency loss to requiring more complex higher redundancy signal coding due to the energy loss in the laser across the distance (since it spreads out, vs a fiber maintaining most energy). Even if you used dense LEO satellites like Starlink it remains unreliable and the motion of satellites means you can’t have a stable path length.
Tldr it’s useless for almost everything. You need to be able to not just use efficient live path selection when sending traffic, you have to be able afford to pay for QoS priority on wildly expensive satellites due to all the specifical equipment and hardware capacity limits. If you’re not doing high speed trading arbitrage you can’t make that money back.
Just look at what the experts say in the paper below. Below 3000 km it’s always slower. Starlink doesn’t have the capacity to beat the 3000 km threshold now. USA is something like 4500 km across. The investment alone to beat fiber from coast to coast (the ideal scenario) makes it not worth trying.
If you’re not doing high speed trading arbitrage you can’t make that money back.
Exactly. It is lower latency.
You’re moving the goal posts now to the problem being commercial viability for a subset of activity.
Look at the paper I added. It does lose up to a huge distance because of the uplinks and satellite movement. It takes something ridiculous to get use of space lasers, because otherwise I was completely right, you ADD enough distance to the path for lasers to lose.
And if fiber gets improved further by fibers which slow light less (up from 67% of c) then the threshold distance grows proportionally
