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After Texas’ blue wave, what happens to Elon Musk and SpaceX? “Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now.” (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 days ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 26 points 2 days ago (6 children)

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?

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  • [–] 7 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [+] -24 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 day ago*

    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.

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  • [–] 21 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

    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.

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