Why put data centers in space?

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• ravelin@lemmy.ml ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  No, it seems like you understand it perfectly.

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• 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.

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  • 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.

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    • 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.

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    • cley_faye@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨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.

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  • holy_scroller@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I wish you could make money off of nowing when a company is spouting bullshit, but after watching Tesla stock for a decade…

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• BlackLaZoR@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  There’s no reason, Musk is just bullshiting like with Mars colony by 2025.

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  • W3dd1e@lemmy.zip ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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.

    A list of Elon Musk’s terrible business ideas

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  • humanspiral@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    BS is fair, 90% of it. There needed to be an excuse for xAI merger is origin of the BS.

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• TallonMetroid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  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.

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  • chickenf622@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    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

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    • towerful@programming.dev ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      To the point that they occasionally have to use the solar panels to shade the radiators.
      Thermals in space are difficult

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  • lando55@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    We can just terraform space duh

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• swordgeek@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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  • FE80@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Also, pure hypermasculine fetishism.

    This is the weirdest take on data centers ever.

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• humanspiral@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  There is zero economic reason. Most optimistic cost estimates are 5x more expensive than earth systems powered by solar and batteries. With near term optimism 10x more expensive.

  The only reason is skynet that is immune for anyone in the US pulling the plug from skynet. Russia/China can already hit sattelites or terrestrial datacenters with missiles, and space ones are more vulnerable because Americans are more likely to cheer destruction of skynet assets used to oppress them.

  The other factor is international law permits squatters rights to the most desirable orbits. 300 years from now, we may need power/data beemed to/from space. Privatizing it for oligarchy is a great long term investment if it is subsidized by US government.

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• MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  The tech billiionaires got annoyed by regulations and complaints and are looking for a easier way.

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  • harmbugler@piefed.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    We towed it outside the environment.

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    • XeroxCool@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Into another environment, no?

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  • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Meanwhile China is putting them underwater for passive cooling.

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• TwodogsFighting@lemdro.id ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  They’re harder for us to burn to the fucking ground if we can’t reach them.

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• Krusty@quokk.au ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Skynet. They want to build skynet. Go watch Terminator. I guess that’s going to become a posthumous documentary.

  • Global geographic coverage with very low dependence on local infrastructure
  • Extremely difficult physical access compared with a conventional datacenter
  • Enormous distributed sensor/communications/computing network
  • Integration with Starlink’s existing global communications infrastructure
  • Resilience against localized disasters or attacks
  • Direct access to governments and militaries that want autonomous communications, sensing, and computation
  • Essentially uninterruptible power source
  • Guided weapon systems, military intelligence and recon

  Etc… come on. It’s skynet! That’s the funny thing you called a data center but really that’s kind of the least of what’s going on.

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• Strider@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Snake oil. As almost everything else.

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• chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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  • KurtVonnegut@mander.xyz ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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?

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    • humanspiral@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      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.

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• Lasherz12@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  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.

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• NaibofTabr@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  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.

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• Snapz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Because it sounds like “future” to stupids.

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• plz1@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Direct solar, easy heat dissipation, SpaceX stock price

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  • impairedimperator@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    “easy heat dissipation” lol there is nothing easy about getting rid of heat in space.

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  • XeroxCool@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Overheating is a massive issue outside the atmosphere. There’s no passive airflow to transfer heat through convection and there’s no air at all to utilize conduction. The only method left is radiation - the mechanism that let’s you feel the heat of a fire from the side. That’s the slowest option of them all.

    Space is not cold in any sense of thermal management because space is essentially empty. Representations of people/fluids freezing when evacuated into space isn’t a good representation of actual thermal management. While there is some freezing effect, it’s because the rapid vaporizaiton of water cools the remaining water and can go below the freezing point. But, realistically, bodies don’t really freeze to an appreciable degree. Meanwhile, for everything else not containing water, there’s nothing to cool it down. In fact, of the very few particles that are flying around, they’re actually quite hot. Atoms flying for millions of years are still over 20,000 degrees.

    So no. Thermal management makes orbital data centers the actual worst option.

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• cley_faye@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Transferring huge amount of data between space and earth’s surface is costly and a big bottleneck. If you have a lot of data coming from space (satellite watches and listen to a lot of stuff) that needs processing, you can hit that bottleneck. Moving processing power into space removes it. Data transfer, using any kind of wave (even light) can be make way more efficient, so you can process a massive amount of data way faster, and only send back down there the result.

  This has two obvious type of applications : useful for humanity, and dreadful for humanity. Think, doing weather forecast vs. using worldwide pinpoint tracking of any electronic device, including ones that don’t necessarily have wireless capabilities. Guess which one will be prevalent.

  Well, that, and doing a pump’n’dump with investors money, since for now the technology to do that reliably isn’t really a thing, and spacex whitepaper just goes “yeah, we know this is a problem, we don’t care”.

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  • JcbAzPx@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    The problem starts when you try to do the math for power and cooling. Plus they’re relying on the deployment being almost free.

    And then there’s the maintenance…

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  • Krusty@quokk.au ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    This guy gets it. Musk is building skynet.

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• BrickEater@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Can’t raid Elons CP database if its floating in space.

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  • cley_faye@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    We’re not even raiding CP factories down on Earth, no need to go in space for that.

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  • KurtVonnegut@mander.xyz ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    You can shoot it down…

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• deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  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.

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  • CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Honestly I feel like a big issue is the physical security. Now your data center is more vulnerable to any orbit capable adversary.

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• BigTrout75@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Because they’re money for space projects and some billionaire wants it.

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• Squibbles@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  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

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  • humanspiral@lemmy.ca ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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.

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• HexesofVexes@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  They want to see if AI can still function while getting randomised bitflips?

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• EponymousBosh@feddit.online ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  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.

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  • Krusty@quokk.au ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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…

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  • eestileib@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    They can’t build datacenters on earth on time and in budget, it’s totally gunna be easier in orbit

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• jrs100000@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  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. You would be paying an extreme premium over ground based for ever FLOP, so, the customer base of practical and legal customers is limited to a handful of very well funded intelligence agencies or scientific projects.

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  • PRIMEcavitationfetishist@quokk.au ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    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.

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    • Flax_vert@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Good news: There is a hell!

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• someguy3@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  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.

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• Abyssian@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  To get space data.

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  • adhdsergio@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Not space centers?

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    • Abyssian@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I don’t think we’ve found the space center. There might not be one. We’d need way more space data to figure it out.

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• wraekscadu@vargar.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Right now, it’s a terribly dumb idea. Here’s why:

  • Getting shit to space is expensive
  • Cooling those data centers would require radiative cooling. The radiators for that would have to be crazy huge.
  • It’s economically unviable when you can build data centers on earth.

  For me, this looks exactly like the “we’re going to Mars, so invest in our space company, yipeeeee” thing.

  That being said, could we see space based computation in the future? Sure. Again, here’s why:

  • It’s more to do with simple energy consumption (not just for computation, but just energy consumption in general).
  • Energy consumed still stays on the planet as heat. Slowly, it radiates away to space. The speed of radiation however scales with the surface area of the planet. Meaning, there’s a strict upper limit of how much “energy consumption” we can do on earth before causing crazy global warming due to this waste heat. Note this is NOT green house gas caused warming. This is caused by more heat on the planetary surface than exiting. Waste heat
  • Ok, so assuming that energy consumption increases 1% per year after the “exponential phase” begins, the planet Earth ITSELF would reach its limits from the standpoint of holding industry in less than a thousand years. The exponential phase for us seems to have started since the industrial revolution. Also, our current increase of energy consumption year over year is quite above 1%. Here’s the paper.
  • Hence, for environmental reasons, there would come a time in human history where we have to put our industry (which includes data centers) in space. Anywhere but Earth.

  Could we develop systems with crazy efficiency? Sure. Maybe. I don’t know. But even if we do, I can’t see a case where the Hedonic treadmill wouldn’t set in, still causing crazy energy consumption.

  Hence, in conclusion, boo to current space companies grifting space based data centers. But yay to eventually putting all industry off planet.

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  • Munkisquisher@lemmy.nz ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    With the amount of heat and greenhouse gasses released into the atmosphere with launch and eventual re-entry, will you ever get to net positive on that equation though?

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  • Krusty@quokk.au ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    The radiators would not have to be that large.

    They just have to be sufficiently hot(T to the 4th power scaling). For the same unit area you would have of incoming solar flux you would have to move heat to a radiator of that exact same unit area to reach about 160° at a mere 70% emissivity. Heat pumps exist that can do that easily.

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    • humanspiral@lemmy.ca ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      large radiators argument is extremely poor. Plan is a mesh of small datacenter modules. The inter nvl72 networking speed is irrelevant for inference/skynet. However, there is no hot semiconductor technology theory that competes with silicon for feature size/speed. There are much better designs than circulating fluid radiators, but all of them, add complexity and pump/nozzle failures. Supercritical compression (heat pump) systems is vastly more prone to failure, including in pipe/connection network. It also means thick, less deployable, radiators.

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  • Apytele@sh.itjust.works ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I had been wondering lately if using the fossil fuels in space instead of on earth isn’t a viable option. It’s like a billion years of sunlight trapped inside the earth’s crust that’s all gotta go somewhere eventually anyway right? As long as it’s not fucking shit up in the atmosphere it could be a lot of use elsewhere maybe?

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    • wraekscadu@vargar.org ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Haha you’re forgetting the second part of the reaction: oxygen. You would need to somehow transport oxygen in addition to fossil fuels in space to burn em. You would need to expend a lot more energy in their transportation than what you would get from them.

      Hence, this idea has merit only to be used for propulsion (for now). Once we crack fusion (which I’m sure we will within this century), fossil fuels lose this application in space too.

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• FaceDeer@fedia.io ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  There's a whole lot of answers in here saying cooling is impossible or super hard, and that people whose literal job is building satellites haven't thought of this. Or that the people whose literal job is building satellites haven't though about all sorts of other basic stuff like "you can't do maintenance on satellites" or "there's radiation in space" or whatnot.

  Yes, they've thought of all those things. Those aren't useful answers

  The main advantages continuous high-power solar energy, different regulations being in play (it's "outside the regulatory environment), and in the case of SpaceX it provides synergy with their own rocket launch business. They're creating their own demand, allowing everything to be cheaper in bulk.

  Yes, it's to "raise the stock value." Isn't that why companies do anything? Doing a thing that produces value is going to raise the value of the stock of the company doing it.

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  • Nibodhika@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Yes, they’ve thought of all those things. Those aren’t useful answers

    That’s where you’re wrong, this is like the hyperloop or solar roadways, where all of the experts agree it’s a dumb idea but you have a rich person trying to sell that to the public with the promise that they’ll solve the issues by the time they get to production.

    You can’t cool things in space effectively, the only way things lose heat in space is through radiation. According to Wikipedia the radiators expel from 100 to 350 W per square meter. My PC generates more heat than that, imagine a data center. A quick Google tells me it’s 5-15kW per rack or 40-60kW per AI rack. Let’s imagine an AI data center, a single rack produces 50kW, so you need 140 square meters per rack. To put this in perspective the space station could host one rack if we removed everything else that produces heat from inside. So you need a megastructure just to host one rack, that will become obsolete in a couple years.

    It’s not feasible, it’s just as stupid an idea as a vacuum tube for trains, and brought to you by the same person too.

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    • FaceDeer@fedia.io ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Here's the usual video I use for this issue, a walk-through of the equations on how things cool in space where Scott Manley runs the numbers and shows that it's perfectly reasonable with a modest radiator panel.

      What temperature are you assuming for the radiators? At 80° Celsius (353 Kelvin) they can do 880 watts per square meter. And bear in mind that radiator panels are double-sided, so that makes 1760 watts per square meter of dedicated panel. 80 degrees is what these chips are meant to run at, if you wanted to you could use a heat pump to make the radiator panels even hotter and they'd get much more efficient - according to the Stefan–Boltzmann law thermal radiation goes up proportional to the fourth power of the temperature. Shouldn't be necessary here though.

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• Elting@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Why put trains underground? The question isn’t of practicality, but if the idea would sound cool to a 10 year old.

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  • Kirp123@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Trains underground? What you mean like subways? There are actual reasons why you would want to do that, like making public transport infrastructure in dense urban locations where you can’t just demolish buildings to make space for your train tracks.

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    • Redditmodstouchgrass@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I’m assuming they were thinking of freight trains, possibly specifically in the US, where they have to cross thousands of miles. That would in fact be a massive waste of tunnel digging.

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    • Elting@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Im specifically referencing hyperloop. Of course there are some contexts (usually dense urban ones) where trains in tunnels make sense, just like there are some contexts where putting data infrastructure in space makes sense.

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  • A_A@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    “trains underground” are Musk’s “HyperLoop”
    “data centers in space” are also from him.
    Yes, Elon Musk projects are most often bad.

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• mrdown@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  To protect them from missiles and drones

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• BadmanDan@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  It’s cold up there

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  • fenrasulfr@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    And yet the worst place to cool something since it is a vacuum.

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    • Krusty@quokk.au ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      You really don’t know shit about radiators do you?

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