I wish you could make money off of nowing when a company is spouting bullshit, but after watching Tesla stock for a decade…
Comment on Why put data centers in space?
Archangel1313@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
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.
holy_scroller@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
tempest@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
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.
mushroommunk@lemmy.today 1 day ago
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.
jj4211@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
“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.
halcyoncmdr@piefed.social 1 day ago
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.
Inucune@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
tempest@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
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.
fizzle@quokk.au 1 day ago
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.
humanspiral@lemmy.ca 12 hours ago
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.
cley_faye@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
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.
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
It functioned, mostly, but I wouldn’t say it worked.