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Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea. (taranis.ie)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 20 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (11 children)

Yes, and it's easier to cool things on earth. In space, there's no air to help you cool thinks off, you can only reject heat through radiation. Most spacecraft are carefully designed to reflect heat/light on surfaces facing the sun and radiate heat into empty space from surfaces that are shaded.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (9 children)

    What if you build it on an asteroid or moon or planet. Uranus is ~-225⁰C, right?

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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Yes, but the two-and-a-half hour lag each way would be a killer.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    My understanding is that these "datacenters" would be used exclusively for model training, where latency doesn't matter.

    It is still an outrageously stupid idea for a zillion other engineering reasons, though.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    There's also the issue that around once a year the two planets will be on opposite sides of the sun. Not only would you have a lag of close to 3 hours, but communication would be completely impossible for a month or so at a time.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago* (4 children)

    It would need to have an atmosphere, so asteroids and most (all? Idk not an astronomer) moons are out.

    Mars might be feasible at some point in the far future, but there's still the lag problem of 3-20 minutes depending on time of year, so not very useful for anything user facing.

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago* (1 child)

    most moons

    Pretty much every moon but Titan. Titan, however, would be excellent for heat dissipation. Long before generative AI was even a thing, scientists have speculated that Titan would be the perfect place for datacenters because low-temperature computation is so much more efficient.

    Of course, building a datacenter on Titan would be a several-hundred-trillion dollar endeavor, so... good luck bootstrapping your way into that industry.

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  • [–] -1 points 8 months ago* (1 child)

    None of the moons in our solar system have atmospheres. Earths moon is too small to hold on to an atmosphere, and the Galilean moons of Jupiter are too cold for an atmosphere, the gases just freeze.

    The best place would be either a space station in low earth orbit or of the L4 or L5 point. The data issue would be the problem though I suppose you could just use the data centres for training but not for active processing but then you would need to build data centres on earth for that.

    Given that you're going to build the earth data centres anyway you might as well do all of the processing on earth at the same time.

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