This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
My new supervisor, the day I met him, was talking about how space data centers are a great idea ("because it's so cold up there!") and will be amazing when they're online. That's the moment I realized he was breathtakingly stupid. He may not believe in thermodynamics, but thermodynamics believes in him.
I guess I shouldn't have expected much given that he has a degree in finance and has worked in consulting for 10 years.
I felt exactly the same way about Elon Musk back in 2018(?) when he went on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and said the easiest way to terraform Mars was to just nuke the polar ice caps...and voila...instant atmosphere.
I don't think I've ever palm-slapped my forehead that hard in my life. All of a sudden I knew he was just another fuckin' moron with way too much money to burn.
Mars doesn't even have a magnetosphere, any atmosphere you create would fuck right off into space
And even if it worked (and it would take a LOT of nukes to work) ... well, congrats: now Mars has an atmosphere -- a highly radioactive atmosphere.
Thanks to Mars's lack of a magnetic field, high radiation levels are already a concern. Adding even more radiation into the mix really isn't going to help any of your terraforming goals.
And that's why we should just drop a few million cockroaches on Mars and let them figure it out! /s
Great. And now a few years later, Earth is being invaded by highly advanced mutant cockroaches from Mars.
If you make it fast enough it will stick around for a while. "A while" in planetary terms can be a few hundred thousand or million years. So it's possible you could produce sufficient atmosphere to make it breathable, and it would remain so for longer than human civilization up to now. Of course, by possible, I mean with the right tools and the resources to support that, which would be substantial. Feel free to find out how many comets you would have to impact into Mars to get that.
He may not believe in thermodynamics
How does thermodynamics make this a bad idea? Is it because the heat generated can't escape?
Yeah. The only way to cool things in space is to radiate it away with fins, or the more destructive approach of jettisoning material.
How do the fins help if there's no hot material being jettisoned? Are we assuming there is some atmosphere that will absorb the heat through (I'm guessing) convection?
Radiation is the part you are missing. The three ways of dissipating heat are: conduction, convection, and radiation which is what the "fins" do.
Doesn't it work out to something like a full kilometer of the things in order for it to work? The idea is pure madness.
No. In the vacuum of space there is no convection. The only maintenance free(ish) method of discharging waste heat is to radiate it as infrared, which is not terribly effective compared to terrestrial heat management systems where we have the benefit of a big old atmosphere to dump heat into.
Radiative cooling into space is seriously weaksauce. The amount of heat an object can dissipate in such a manner is described by the Stefan-Boltzmann Law. It would take nearly a square meter (0.84 m^2^ according to my admittedly possibly shaky math) of perfectly ideal thermally conductive black body radiator material to dissipate the 640 watts of waste heat from just one datacenter style GPU at 70° C.
A square meter of heatsink. For one GPU.
Your radiator heat sink can't be shaped like a terrestrial one, either, with stacked fins providing a high surface area in a small volume. That's because a black body radiator is not only an ideal emitter of heat into a vacuum, such as it is, but also an ideal receiver. Your heat sinks will have to be wide and flat so they don't radiate most of their heat right back into other parts of themselves, and this also precludes putting your equipment near other pieces of equipment so they don't radiate their heat into each other.
A single server rack in an AI data center will consume and thus have to dissipate something like 80 killowatts, i.e. 80,000 watts, which even if you had access to some type of physics-experiment-land totally ideal radiator material with an emissivity of exactly 1 would require a 102 square meter radiator just to dissipate that same 70° C. And no part of it could be baking in the sun, nor be influenced thermally by any adjacent servers. In reality it'd have to be even larger, because such a perfectly ideal material does not exist.
TL;DR: Getting rid of heat in space is extremely difficult and in fact is one of the biggest challenges of spacecraft design. Thus putting massive heat generating computers in space is a self-evidently moronic idea as cooling them would be effectively impossible.
Thanks for the thorough answer. I guess I'll just scrap this orbital data centre I was building.
The short version is - if you've ever heard of infrared cameras that can see heat, that's because everything glows based on heat. When things are very hot the glow is visible, but even cool things emit light outside of the visible spectrum. And emitting light takes energy, which means blackbody radiation (as this is called) takes energy (heat) away.
That and the fact that space is not just extremely cold but also extremely hot, depending on what's between the subject and the sun.
AI as a cultural phenomenon has been truly exceptional at revealing the extent to which the privileged are just literally mouth breathing thumb sucking mental invalids.
We should be laughing in their faces, when they say shit this stupid. We should be pointing out that they must have failed highschool physics, mocking them, to their faces, with a little bit of accidental spittle to drive it home.
We literally have to shame these fucking morons or they will destroy human civilization.
As someone with actual experience working in datacenters, this shit needs constant maintenance and repair. You can't afford to pay for my travel expenses to reboot a server.
There's a bunch of sealed underwater data centres and they found reliability went right up (see Project Natick). Underwater has the benefit of actually having cooling though ..
Yet Microsoft abandoned the idea because it was so fraught with commercialisation issues. Which is exactly what the experts are saying
Can't maintain, can't upgrade, can't repair, it pollutes the environment with abandoned shit and it doesn't scale
Reliability probably went up because of the extra expense put into making sure it won't immediately fail and need to be repaired
I'm not saying the space data centres are a good or even viable idea, just saying you can improve the reliability significantly if you try. The space data centre planis a non starter, there's nowhere for the heat to go.
Yes, investing in reliability will increase reliability
You can radiate the heat with a biiiig long radiator but it doesn't solve any of the other problems or improve commercial scalability
Right, I'm sure the hard radiation will help with that as well.
Everyone hyped on AI data centers is forgetting there's no air in space with which to conduct the heat away. A comparatively "tepid" human body could take over 24 hours to freeze solid in space because the only option is for the heat to radiate.
Than there's the part where disposable rockets and satellites like starlink are literally destroying the ozone CFC style.
They’re just going to have kilometers wide radiator panels 🧐🤪
That shit was actually funny to see in one of the AI slop white papers.
There are probably solutions, but pumping fluid kilometers there and back is a freaking sell
I think it is a great idea so long as the billionaires go there to stay with the data centres for maintenance purposes. They are the only geniuses who can do it!
Meanwhile China already has data centers in the ocean. Almost anything they do you can bet it's a good idea [economically] because they're not at the point to where they can waste billions and still come out on top like the US has done for decades.
Microsoft experimented with oceanic data centers too, and I don't believe they actually abandoned that project either. It's just Musk and his ilk are very loud and outsized loudness has a tendency to dominate public discourse.
The Yahoo!tech writers went on a deep dive and watched a YouTube video.
Never heard of this. But even if you could connect to them, how would you cool it?
Edit: never mind, that's exactly what the article is about.
