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What does space give us that Earth does not in this scenario? Free real estate? They only mention falling costs for deployment.
by zamalek 1y ago
What does space give us that Earth does not in this scenario? Free real estate? They only mention falling costs for deployment.
- tux3 1y ago[flagged]
- xnx 1y agoI do wonder about data centers in the arctic. Cut out the middle step of greenhouse gases and melt the polar caps directly.
- chewbacha 1y agoNot to mention the benefit of directly harming extremely vulnerable ecosystems! Win-win
- btown 1y ago[flagged]
- dang 1y agoCan you please not post comments like this? Thoughtful criticism is welcome, of course, but this sort of thing isn't. Besides breaking the site guidelines, it takes threads in less interesting directions and evokes even worse comments from others. We're trying to avoid that here. "Don't be snarky." "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." "Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- tux3 1y agoReally, on second look, snark still feels justified here. The issue is with TFA. There is little room for a thoughtful comment in response to something transparent. Some type of submissions will invariably not result in very deep discussion, when the topic itself is so shallow.
- dang 1y agoWe need you (I don't mean you personally, of course, but all commenters here) to follow the site guidelines regardless of how bad an article is or you feel it is. Someone else being wrong or some other post being bad isn't a reason to make things worse. Doing so just creates a downward spiral, which it's all too easy to fall into. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=downward%20spiral%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
- toraway 1y agoTbh your moderation is normally very restrained and even handed so was a bit surprising to see you take down several borderline overly snarky comments in a row (that just so happen to be directed against VC investors or YC founders).
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dang 1y agoTo me those comments seemed over the line, not borderline! I'd post the same replies wherever I saw comments like that, regardless of who or what they're about.
- dilyevsky 1y agoThere's an answer in their whitepaper[0] - see Table 1. tl;dr - power is continuous and free via solar array [0] - https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf
- richardwhiuk 1y agoFree in the sense of astronomical capital and operational costs.
- dilyevsky 1y agor&d sure, not sure about ops as you can probably just detach a faulty module and launch a replacement.
- richardwhiuk 1y agoRelaunching is effectively operational cost.
- SahAssar 1y agoStationkeeping is not free, satellite monitoring is not free, and any replacement to any component is now a multi-year, at least 1+ million dollar affair (or most likely a complete replacement, since not many satellites have done in-situ repairs).
- GTP 1y agoNot an expert in this area, but I think that that "just" is hiding a lot of complexity. Plus you also need some remotely operated robots to mount the replacement.
- cj 1y ago> “We still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this technology… there’s no way to get there without a breakthrough… we need fusion or we need radically cheaper solar plus storage or something” -Sam Altman It's kind of depressing that the only way to make this tech better is to feed it more energy. (And apparently now to send it to space)