In a blog post, Musk said the acquisition was warranted because global electricity demand for AI cannot be met with “terrestrial solutions,” and Silicon Valley will soon need to build data centers in space to power its AI ambitions.
This dumb fuck. Unfortunately, his boosters will be all-in on this messaging. Whatever.
No cooling capacity? Isn’t it the extreme opposite?
No, it’s pretty hard to get rid of heat in space, vacuum is a very good insulator. The only way is radiation.
Thanks
No, space isn’t cold it’s empty. You need something to conduct away the heat, otherwise all you can do is passively radiate it
Fascinating. Will look more into it to understand.
I think Scott Manly might have had a video on it (data enter in space) recently. I saw it on a feed but haven’t watched it. I’m sure he would mention the issues with heat removal.
https://youtu.be/DCto6UkBJoI
TLDW: cooling’s fine if you use starlink V2 size and power (which is not very suitable for AI ‘datacentre’ use) because it works already.
This is not about a few huge datacentres, it’s about a million small ones. There’s 99 problems with this (see Kessler syndrome !, radiation, …), cooling isn’t (much of) one.
Doesn’t matter anyway, it just has to be vaguely plausible for a stock IPO pump (and dump) scheme while sweeping all that xAI debt under the rug.
Cued…
https://youtu.be/DCto6UkBJoI&t=12m37s
https://youtu.be/d-YcVLq98Ew&t=8m24s
Doesn’t say why a vacuum cannot conduct heat though, but it makes sense to me now anyhow. Heat is vibrating molecules so to mitigate the vibration you need adjacent molecules which aren’t vibrating as much.
Welcome to middle school physics.
Read the traveller sourcebooks, they especially for the ship designs. Good stuff