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.
Vacuum does not vent heat.
This has been a PSA.
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 :)
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
Boil em, mash em, worship em
What if…… we didn’t put them anywhere
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!
only if it falls on Musks HQ, and his homes, or any of the tech billionaires homes.
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.
lol. I don’t wish him any harm, I just want him far from those he might continue to harm.
Elmo will have to move to Floriderp.
kinda hard to do that when he invested so much time and money on blexas
lol let him waste his money on an impossible technology
He doesn’t waste his money on his companies. He wastes tax payer funding on them. And when that started drying up, he took it to the stock market, convinced the exchange to fast track adding his company to being eligible for indexes, and then wasted our 401ks on it. He’s the ultimate con man.
Yes but that only lasted weeks before collapsing. The end is coming, he is now trying to roll Twitter into spacex. It’s where his real riches are. When it eventually goes, so does his money
I’m hoping for a push by the people to pressure the Democrats to defund Musk. All his tech is shit and hurts people.
With Trump, he got no-bids.
And kill us all by destroying the ozone layer again? No thank you.
I’m not sure what it has to do with the ozone, please explain.
One of the major environmental issues with launching mega-constellations is the environmental impact of their end-of-life deorbiting. As satellites reenter the atmosphere, they create aluminum oxide particulate that has a negative impact on the ozone layer.
Because, of course they do. We always have to find ways to destroy our beautiful planet, as if a new Earth-like planet is just a skip away.
Don’t you worry your poor little mind…the same folks destroying everything for their wealth are working on magic space ships to get us to earth 2, environmental bugaloo.
Thanks
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!
Just confirming what I’ve suspected: the point of the space datacenter thing is to keep the tools of oppression out of reach of angry mobs with torches and pitchforks.
Data center in space: untouchable
Strictly necessary ground radio station to get any usable amount of data to and from said data center: still flammable
You wouldn’t say untouchable if you’d seen me with a slingshot.
You could burn the ground stations down, but they’re all around the world, and all it takes is 1 to route the data to via the inter satellite laser links. You’d definitely add latency though taking out ground stations near you.
And I don’t know if the space datacenter is quite as untouchable as he thinks…
It will obviously be in a very low orbit, because that’s the easiest to reach and construct…
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Maybe it would be within reach of some fairly advanced amateur rocketry? We don’t have to reach a stable orbit, which makes things much easier. Just shoot it straight up, with much less velocity needed than for orbit. In fact, the speed difference between our rocket and his orbital datacenter will be very useful – that speed difference will lead to a very energetic impact.
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Maybe it could be vulnerable to some directed energy weapons? Very strong lasers, highly directional microwave beams, that sort of thing.
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There’s always hacking. For extra irony bonus, use Space Grok to vibe code the tools you need to hack its orbital control systems. Then you can de-orbit it or collide it with other objects in orbit.
It would probably be easier to launch shrapnel into their orbit than try to hit one, and let them begin to cascade into each other. The dishes are so low (or at least starlink is), that there’d be no real kessler risk since it’d all fall back down to earth in 5 years or less.
The latter two would be way easier.
You’d think… But a laser or microwave emitter that big would also be quite an undertaking.
Honestly, hacking seems the most likely option to succeed on a small scale.
Oh absolutely. Waiting and pouncing on some vulnerability would be the safe bet. Maybe blind their sensors or command and control uplink radios with lasers or microwaves, not damage them directly.
We have had missles that you can lob from a high altitude aircraft, and hit a satellite, since the 80s.
Can we please not destroy objects in orbit? It’s already crowded up there without untrackable debris. Deorbiting is much safer and probably easier, considering the precision needed to hit anthying, especially because those satellites would have station keeping thrusters to evade other satellites.
Great way to enforce a moratorium on new large-scale projects in LEO for a few years.
@Jobe @technology The precision is do-able, at least by high-tech nation states. The closing speed is so great that evasion using low-power station-keeping thrusters is just not fast enough to avoid terminal guidance of the impact vehicle. Plus, the targeted sats may not even be looking. In around 2008, the US demo’ed an anti-sat rocket that took only 119 seconds from surface launch to kinetic impact on a satellite in a 272 mile high orbit. In that instance, we are told at 95% of the debris de-orbited quickly, with the last sizable piece taking around a year to come down. So they say. I agree that creating more space debris is not a good idea.
[…] that speed difference will lead to a very energetic impact. […] Then you can […] collide it with other objects in orbit.
How to make space worse and everyone hate you - 101
Well, maybe don’t fuck over most of the population so much that they see no progress as preferable to progress that only benefits the oppressors.
It will obviously be in a very low orbit, because that’s the easiest to reach and construct…
Well, for a bunch of reasons, these space data centers probably won’t be at very low orbits. First and foremost, very low orbits like the ones starlink uses experience a lot of atmospheric drag. With the huge solar arrays these data centers will need, that high drag environment is a killer. Going just a bit farther out would significantly reduce that drag. Also, latency isn’t a huge concern with space data centers, so very low orbits aren’t required. Lastly, since those low orbits are so highly valuable and contested, it just doesn’t make sense to put something there that doesn’t need to be there.
TLDR: Space data center orbits are likely to be somewhere between 500 - 1000 km altitudes.
And yes, that’s in untouchable range for anything but advanced militaries.
What it’s not untouchable to is legislation. That’s the practical way to fight it.
I really hope they don’t go into the 700-1000km range with something of this scale if it actually happens as thats where a real risk of debris staying in orbit for hundreds or thousands of years starts to happen if something catastrophic happens to the constellation.
China blew up a satellite in a test in the 800km area and it’ll be there for hundreds of years.
Yeah, that’s a valid point. And yeah, that’s totally where they’re gonna put them. They’re gonna be huge, delicate targets…
I’m generally pro space, I think all the massive advances in space flight in these last couple of decades has been truly amazing. That said, I wish I had a more positive way to spin this, but yeah, that’s a serious concern. That’s bad.
It won’t happen, but if globally we could agree to put a moratorium on large constellations in those orbits until we have more experience with constellations in the really low orbits, that would at least help and give us more time to learn. Without everyone agreeing though, someone else will just be like, MINE and fill it anyway.
Edit: like lets see what happens as starlink becomes even bigger and moves into 10s of thousands, and kupier appears etc before moving up higher.
Very low orbits are less of a concern, though. Because if the worst happens, they and the vast majority of their debris will be slowed by atmospheric drag and fall relatively quickly.
The following is a reference and spoiler for Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
spoiler
What we need to do is hijack a submersible fortress, steal the prototype railgun designed for stealth-launching nuclear warheads, and mount the rail gun on the fortress so you can guard it with your battle-harem of cyborg soldier women. Bonus points for getting your arm chopped off by a ninja, replacing it with a transplant, getting possessed by the donor’s ghost because you were unknowingly the child of a medium, but then getting the transplant arm replaced by a prosthetic and hypnotizing yourself into thinking you’re still possessed because reasons… Oh yeah, point the railgun at the orbital data center while all this is going on to ragebait the clone sibling of the arm donor I guess!
Easy!
Man, those games got wild… I mean, they started pretty wild. But yeah.
Indeed. I had to remind people that this was the actual third/fourth act of a flagship title and I was among the many people who took it very seriously because it “changed gaming forever, it was art!”
I mean, I still love Metal Gear Solid, but we have to be able to see it with some objectivity
It’ll be very touchable while being built.
A variant of the first bullet is another option: put something in orbit going in the opposite direction, then release a few dozen ball bearings in the path of Elon’s data center. Closing speed is something on the order of 100 km/hr. That should do just fine.
“Kessler” bullets, amirite?
Trying to put something in reverse orbit is even more difficult and requires a much more powerful rocket. Normal orbits follow the same direction as the earth’s rotation, because that allows you to take advantage of the earth’s already-existing rotational speed to give you a head start on achieving enough speed to reach orbit.
Putting something into reverse orbit (while possible) is significantly more difficult, because now the earth’s rotation is working against you. It has been done a few times, but it’s significantly more expensive and difficult to achieve, which is going to be a problem for amateurs trying to shoot down a space station.
Anyway, the difference between orbital velocity and a (relatively stationary) rocket that has been fired straight upward will be plenty of speed difference to cause lots of damage on impact.
I like yours better than my suggestion because it has a sort of “Home Alone in Space” vibe to it!
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Good thing the whole idea makes no sense, because repairs are impossible, you can only vent heat in infrared, you have to use expensive rockets to get them up there, and if they’re in LEO, they’ll fall back down to earth. Oh, and there’s more likelyhood that bits get flipped from all of the high energy particles up there.
It’ll just make LLMs at scale even more infeasible.
Just FYI the rockets won’t be expensive if this plan ends up working.
The only way this works beyond a tech demo, is if Starship works.
If Starship works as planned (big if), the marginal cost to orbit will round down to the cost of fuel to launch over the lifetime of the rocket.
Starship being fully reusable and working is going to be a mind boggling change in what access to space looks like and means.
To run one rack of GPUs they will be about 100 square meters of solar panels and 30 square meters of radiators. That’s about 130 kilowatts of compute power. To get a gigawatt multiply that by 6,000. Musk is claiming he wants to send terawatts up to there.
The numbers didnt make sense for his tunnel thing either, but thats because he has never been an engineer but a hype-man who manipulates governments and markets for proffit.
The stats you listed are close to what 1 satellite would be if memory serves.
But when he talks about sending terrawatts up there, he’s talking about having a moon base manufacturing them and launching them into orbit with a mass acceleator, so if we’re doing that… ramping up some solar/radiator manufacturing capacity isn’t as far fetched. Were fully into sci-fi land at that point.
Yeah it’s tricky, given the pushback people are showing against datacenter construction, the issues around power, the vulnerability to attack… The space data center idea is starting to become more attractive to big tech over time, not less.
Initially, everyone agreed that the numbers just don’t add up, there’s no way it could be economical. But then these terrestrial datacenters started getting a lot of bad press, everyone was concerned about the environmental impact, about the strain on the energy grid, about water usage. All of a sudden the space plan is seeming less crazy.
and if they’re in LEO, they’ll fall back down to earth. Oh, and there’s more likelyhood that bits get flipped from all of the high energy particles up there.
You’re thinking about the right things here, these are major issues! But, they can largely avoid serious problems here. Over 500 km, there’s a lot less drag and these aren’t just going to fall out of the sky. And under 1000 km the earth’s magnetic field still mostly protects them from high energy particles. They will still definitely be more exposed to high energy particles causing random bit flips, but it’s going to be in a totally manageable range.
Giant AI datacenters will truly never be an efficient or wise use of resources, at least in my opinion, it’s just a largely stupid endeavor. But for better or worse, I expect we will be seeing some of these space based data centers in the near future. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how economically sustainable they are…
Bad press doesn’t mean they can start losing even more money on space data centers (which are going to be incredibly inefficient and costly). They already do not make a profit, they’re all deep in the red.
Drag is not the only problem (even though these would definitely be LEO, it is just even more expensive to not have them in LEO and it increases latency), nor are bit flips. The biggest issue will continue to be heat. If you haven’t been to a data center before, you may be surprised at how much heat they generate. I’ve only been to non-LLM data centers, and the heat in the warm aisles was unbearable.
And that’s without the sun heating the exterior to incredible amounts. You cannot use contact to dump heat into space.
You might also be surprised at how much e-waste data centers generate, especially LLM-geared data centers. They obliterate hardware, even with optimal cooling, and that hardware requires constant replacement. How are they going to manage that?
Also, unless they use nuclear (which would drastically increase costs and add heat) they’re going to need gigantic solar arrays, much bigger than the IIS’ array.
you can only vent heat in infrared
Yeah, when you heat something, it emits infrared. Kind of the nature of hot things.
I think CorrectAlias meant that heat transfer by direct contact, which is how we cool things in general, is not available, making cooling a datacenter cluster in space actual science fiction.
This is exactly what I meant, thanks.
@phutatorius @technology So, a high-efficiency thermoelectric generator, powered by #datacenter heat directly, might be a win-win. I don’t understand why the current (jk) #technology efficiency is still so low. Surely someone must be working on this.
you still need thermal radiators to create the temperature differential.
There’s always lasers…
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?
There’s only a rack worth of compute on each satellite. There is nothing monstrous to deal with individually. The plans are to put up a very large quantity of these which will sum up to a large amount.
That probably makes training on them less effective, and that would likely remain a land based thing, but for inference, any given person probably doesn’t need more than 1 rack of compute to themselves, and if they do, they’d probably be using something land based.
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.
Keeping one rack of GPU running needs basically all the uninhabited parts of the international space station. That’s roughly 100 kilowatt. That’s 10.000 ISS sized installations, man’s most expensive object ever made, for a gigawatt datacenter. I just hope he’s forced to bankroll this personally
It’s stupid on so many levels… yeah first and foremost basically everything about space is terrible for data centers.
What are the 3 things a data center needs.
Power, cooling, good internet connection. Obviously power is complicated as heck, yeah solar is a bit more direct, but also hits total blackouts when it winds up in the shadow of things… and shielding etc… from all the radiation is a pain and a half, solar pannels will need to be drastically bigger and heavier than their earth counterparts, which is expensive as hell to send up there.
but the harder part… cooling. People think of space as cold, but that’s innacurate… there’s no air to be cold… things stay at the temperature they are… if you have something constantly pumping out heat… it’s insanely difficult to get the heat to radiate out.
Just read a comment about exactly this a few days ago. Anyone working on space components know that a very hat problem to work on is how to keep things cool because, well - having the fucking sun shine on things most of the time directly without the ozone layer and air to dissipate heat in and way does make things go hot.
Also, you forgot a very important thing a data center needs: people that work there. That is one of the reasons we currently build data centers so close to urban sprawls in Arizona instead of somewhere in the middle of Alaska or in polar regions. There must be personnel working onsite all the time.
Also it will need repairs. And probably more often than not due to the radiation.
And micro meteorites pelting it
It’s funny to me because the moon would be a much better choice, if latency wasn’t an issue. Don’t get me wrong, if your aim is uptime, reliability and ease of upgrades/use then terrestrial based is your only option.
But if your goal was off Earth, the moon has a number of advantages that free floating in orbit lacks. You can place the servers themselves underground in lavatubes or excavated caverns as well as install heat-sinks (or even seal a cavern, pressurize it and use what ever gaseous medium for extra heat capacity and thermal transfer) then place a series of solar on the surface with battery support (remembering that lunar nights are 2 weeks long) to generate all your power needs, as well as take advantage of the moon’s tidally locked nature to have your transmission and receivers always pointed at the Earth, or relay satellites in orbit.
Such a project could coincide with NASA or other agencies or enterprises looking to establish settlements on the moon for research or mining purposes, so you could have short or long term settlements with technicians on hand to troubleshoot any problems that arise or even get semi regular (every 18-24 months) deliveries of components for repairs and upgrades for your system, something that long term would be a lot simpler logistically and more stable than attempting a satellite or constellation of satellites any Earth orbit.
The plan is nonsensical for a number of reasons, namely the cost and long term dedication, but it makes a hell of a lot more sense than trying to put an energy intensive project in orbit and hope the lowest bidder parts last more than 6 months.
I’m not sure the moon makes a lot of sense.
I mean, the two weeks of darkness is the real killer.
I mean look, let’s say our datacenter requires 100 kw of power. That means about an 800 square m solar array. If you need to store enough power to run the system through a two week night, you’ll need a lot of batteries and a much larger array. You’ll only be collecting power half the time, so the array needs to be twice as large. But there are about 30% losses in transferring energy to the battery, drain over time, and then transferring back, so some quick math says you now need somewhere around 230kw, for a 1800 square m solar array.
Currently, an array large enough to generate 100kw weighs between 1-2 tons. If we’re optimistic and say 1 ton, that’s 2.25 tons for our equivalent moon array
Now the batteries. The capacity needs to be enough to store 130kw over the course of two weeks. 130kw x 24hours x 14days = 43,680 kw hours of storage. Lithium ion batteries weigh about 5kg per kwh of storage. 43,680 kwh of storage would weigh 218 tons. And that’s just the base weight of the batteries, I didn’t factor in whatever structures or systems the batteries would need to be usable in space.
Here’s where I point out that it costs about $5 mil per ton sent to orbit. It costs somewhere between $100 mil and $1 bil to send 1 ton to the moon. Personally, I think it’s a lot easier to send 1 ton to low earth orbit, than to send 220 tons all the way to the moon. I think the only way to make data centers on the moon make sense, would be if you’re already living and working on the moon in a functioning settlement.
As crazy as orbital data centers are, if your counting in dollars, lunar data centers are literally 10,000 times crazier.
Well, you’re thinking about the right things for sure! Power, cooling, Internet connection, all super important.
But as it turns out, terrestrial solar panels are actually heavier than space solar panels, like a lot heavier. Shielding against radiation is actually less of a challenge than shielding against weather and acorns. The ISS updated it’s solar array a while back and its new ones were deployed by rolling them out, they were a thin enough film to actually roll up for launch and then roll out once attached to the ISS.
Also, these solar panels won’t have blackouts. With a sun synchronous orbit, these panels simply won’t be in shadow basically ever. The one exception would be during solar eclipses.
As for cooling, you do probably need radiators with active cooling systems. Generally you need radiator panels at a ratio of about 1/5 of the area of your solar panels, but this can vary with different designs. But that’s a linear relationship, cooling doesn’t become unfeasible at some point it just remains a design concern. The more power you generate, the more radiators you need. It’s just part of the cost of power and it scales linearly with the area of your solar array.
People forget that black body radiation is to the 4th power of the temperature difference. I assure you if your server cluster is at 1000 Kelvin cooling will be the least of your worries
You know he’ll take it out of our retirement like he has been doing
Good luck dumbfuck, tell me how easy it is to service, maintain and repair them when you inevitably overheat them, or don’t have the proper shielding so components burn out or degrade beyond useful parameters.
Mars is all red, maybe you want to restart those plans and take your flock of sheeple with you as soon as possible?
I read somewhere recently that they found out Martian soil (regolith) is chalk full (0.5 to 1%) of pechlorates. So I don’t know why this Martian terraform thing is even still talked about. The dust is literally toxic, any food you grow there would also be full of pechlorates as the roots will suck them up with their nitrate transport systems.
Just look at the daily temperatures on Mars. It’s all stupid.
and no, we not mining in space.
As much as I dislike Musk, he probably could tell you in detail. His company is not the only one looking into compute in space, either.
Nah, it’s a grift. The Melon’s pitch straight up includes factually wrong physics claims. It is not easier, nor cheaper, to have data centers in space.
Actual scientists have done the math. Even disregarding maintenance for data corruption from radiation, and assuming the best near future tech. It would take 10 times an ISS equivalent structure to power and cool down a single server rack.
Musk promised he wants to get 1 Tera Watt of LLM processing power in orbit. That’s 10,000 times an ISS of solar panels and IR radiators for cooling. The enterprise is completely unrealistic.
The whole thing is just a con to get governments to funnel more money into his companies without having to deliver any actual results.
Yeah, other CEOs also fail basic physics.
Almost like Musk had to buy his physics diploma, eh?
there’s no convection cooling in space, because vacuum is a very good thermal insulator. compute in space does not scale because of that alone. you would need massive (F/M)IR radiator arrays to get rid of the thermal energy.
And every single one of them is a grifter. It would be a lot easier to establish a permanent moon settlement (which can then build datacenters if they want to) than to provide meaningful amounts of compute in orbit.
