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[–] 83 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (35 children)

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.

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  • [–] 56 points 4 months ago* (15 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 31 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Mars doesn't even have a magnetosphere, any atmosphere you create would fuck right off into space

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (11 children)

    He has no imagination, at least in any way that matters.

    What I'd like to see is what would happen if thermonuclear devices were detonated at or very near the core, directionally like a shaped charge to get the core a bit hotter but more importantly moving faster. What impact would that have on the magnetic field of the planet?

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  • [–] 10 points 4 months ago (7 children)

    I think you may either be overestimating the effectiveness of nukes or underestimating the thickness of planets.

    Project Plowshare envisioned using nukes to dig holes on the order of hundreds of meters, not thousands of kilometers.

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  • [–] 0 points 4 months ago (6 children)

    I'm doing neither one, but it's pretty clearly not an idea for this time. We lack an awful lot to be able to pull off a project at that scale, but frankly that makes me more curious not less.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    Even not underestimating the scale, I'm not sure it would work because all the debris would need to be ejected from the thousands-of-kilometers-deep hole. And then you'd also have to have a solution to stop the walls from caving in before the next bomb had a chance to arrive. It's almost as if you not only need thousands of extremely powerful (even for nukes) bombs, but also need to deliver them in a continuous stream to keep the blast pressure up and the hole open.

    I feel like, at that point, the easier strategy to accomplish your goal would be redirecting a large asteroid to impact the planet, or something like that.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    Oh, I don't care about the surface viability. An asteroid capable of altering the core would probably liquefy a significant portion of the planet though which is also not desirable.

    The goal of the thought is to give the planet a magnetosphere closer to that of earth, anywhere between would be a success. The general idea is to get the core somewhat hotter and moving much more, which probably also means it needs a more beefy moon than it has to maintain the change for any significant amount of time.

    idk it's just an idea I like to kick around sometimes.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago*

    Saying it's a matter of scale is an understatement. You need mass to keep the core molten, along with the right combination of elements to produce a working magnetic field that doesn't fade over time. Mars has neither of those things going for it.

    If you want to terraform Mars, you would have to rebuild it from scratch...basically creating a whole new planet with the right core composition and size. Even if you could pull all that material into one location and guide it all into a stable orbit, it would then take hundreds of millions of years to cool and set into something we could even hope to live on.

    I don't think human beings will ever be capable of that level of geoengineering. It's just not realistic given the alternatives.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Isn't that the plot of the movie, "The Core"?

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago (16 children)

    He may not believe in thermodynamics

    How does thermodynamics make this a bad idea? Is it because the heat generated can't escape?

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  • [–] 21 points 4 months ago (14 children)

    Yeah. The only way to cool things in space is to radiate it away with fins, or the more destructive approach of jettisoning material.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (13 children)

    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?

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  • [–] 17 points 4 months ago* (6 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (4 children)

    One day we will figure out how to capture and store waste heat more effectively.

    No idea when tho

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

    And do what with it? You can't use heat to do work without there being temperature differential in the system. Maintaining that differential requires keeping your cold side cold, which means it still must dissipate its heat. In space you would have exactly the same problem doing that as just radiating that heat in the first place. Once your system reaches equilibrium between its hot and cold sides, no work could be done with that heat energy. It's just a radiator with extra steps.

    If capturing heat energy to do something with it did not require sinking the waste heat from that selfsame process someplace, every satellite in orbit would already be covered in Peltiers or similar.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (2 children)

    What if i just want to warm my hands or boil water

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

    Radiation is the part you are missing. The three ways of dissipating heat are: conduction, convection, and radiation which is what the "fins" do.

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  • [–] 10 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    Depends on density. I think Scott Manley's analysis is probably correct. SpaceX knows how to deal with a few thousand watts of heat per satellite from starlink.

    Then the question is whether a few kilowatts is enough compute per node to be worth the trouble.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    I love it when they bring up the dangers of AGI. Dude, what about the dangers right now? Cognitive offloading, psychosis, environmental damage, financial bubble, mass layoffs (I know it's mostly a pretense for that one)...

    Yeah, maybe at some point it'll be capable to destroy us, but right now it looks like we're going to do that before it'll get there.

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  • [–] 44 points 4 months ago (17 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago (11 children)

    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 ..

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  • [–] 25 points 4 months ago* (9 children)

    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

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

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago (7 children)

    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

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  • [–] -3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (6 children)

    You may note that this thread is talking about data centre reliability ..

    Also you can't radiate heat in space ..

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  • [–] -1 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    Also you can’t radiate heat in space …

    How does the Sun work?

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Mostly emitting ungodly amounts of photons and radiations, as far as the earth is concerned. Is that actually cooling it though ?

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

    Yes, all that emitted radiation does cool down the sun. It's why it has a mostly stable temperature instead of getting hotter infinitely.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    Oh so youre saying we should convert the heat generated by the data centres to wide spectrum EM and emit that instead? Amazing! There should be no issues with outputting watts or kilowatts of EM from each of these assuredly numerous space data centres.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (4 children)

    You can't reboot a server remotely? My vast experience having been in one collocation once made me think that surely in big datacentres each server has a remotely controllable switch on its power source, like something that comes integrated with the rack itself? Is that not a thing?

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

    You can't remotely replace hardware.

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  • [–] -1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Did I say "replace"? Oh, sorry, I meant "reboot". Must have been distracted when I typed that. Silly me.

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  • [–] 26 points 4 months ago* (7 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago* (2 children)

    They’re just going to have kilometers wide radiator panels 🧐🤪

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    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

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (3 children)

    nobody actually cares .. nobody wants the damn things.. they can fuck off to space where they can blow up.

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  • [–] 13 points 4 months ago

    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!

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

    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.

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  • [–] 10 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago*

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    Experts do not argue that. The video is actually solid and the white paper they reference definitely is slop.

    This is there repost I've seen with the dumb headline. There is real critic and the rubes dumping money into AI slop inspired renders are bigger idiots but if you are just uncritically throwing ad homenens like this then it looks like you're not living up to your potential either.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    The Yahoo!tech writers went on a deep dive and watched a YouTube video.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    It's cause they can do whatever they want with your data when it's not ruled by earth laws.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    I know it's most likely AI, but for some reason I imagine it's for some popular FPS or RTS or MOBA, and some underhanded players are going to start sending over planes or something to block the satellite signal

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  • [+] -6 points 4 months ago

    "YOU HAVE AI PSYCHOISIS" yells the idiots frothing at the mouth with AI Psychosis.

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  • [–] -5 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    oh fuck off... the point isn't to get them into space... the point is to get them off this damn planet. nobody wants this bullshit grift but idiots who are already addicted to ai slop bullshit.

    nobody cares if these datacenters can dissipate heat in space... because nobody wants these fuckin wastes of resources and water.

    fuck em... throw them, and their ceo fucks into space.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago*

    nobody cares if these datacenters can dissipate heat in space.

    They can't eh.

    Like everyone going off about AI in space is glazing something we should have learned wouldn't work in middle school science class.

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