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> It kinda does make sense if you consider that solar panels in space have been used for a very long time (to power satellites). It stops making sense the seco
by kergonath 9mo ago
> It kinda does make sense if you consider that solar panels in space have been used for a very long time (to power satellites).
It stops making sense the second you ask how you’d dissipate the heat any GPU would create. Sure, you could have vapour chambers. To where? Would this need square kilometers of radiators on top of square kilometers of solar panels? All this just to have Grok in space?
- missingdays 9mo agoBut space is very cold, so no problem there /sarcasm
- geertj 9mo ago> It stops making sense the second you ask how you’d dissipate the heat any GPU would create. The answer, as you surmised, is indeed radiators.
- tim333 9mo agoYou have a dark radiating side on the back of the solar panels. You can spread the GPUs around the solar panels. All the energy in comes from the sun so the temperature should be much the same as any dark panel like object floating in sunlight in space.
- tim333 9mo agoOr something like that - the temperature goes hot and cold as the things go into light and shadow so they have insulation.
- kergonath 9mo agoNo, temperature does not decrease significantly when objects are in the shadows, unless hey stay there for a long time. Even when they don’t get energy from solar radiation, they still dissipate it by radiative transfer, which is very inefficient. So they cool down slowly.
- somenameforme 9mo agoI assume the idea is that they'll be in a solar orbit, so there will be a perpetually sun facing side and a perpetually shaded side. The exact physics behind radiating the heat out in this setup are unclear to me, but it seems difficult to imagine that it would pose significant, let alone insurmountable, difficulties.
- squibonpig 9mo agoRandom objects floating in space do not have GPUs on them which generate heat. You need to move the heat from GPUs to a radiator, so you are describing the actual solution of radiators in a roundabout way. Radiators weigh an amount and cost money. The consequence of factoring this in with optimistic assumptions is that it's about 1/4 as efficient to build space compute as earth compute. It's hype bullshit.
- bigmm 9mo agoElon already answered this type of question before, albeit quite sarcastically iirc, tho I can't find the tweet right now
- squibonpig 9mo agoElon is not a good person to ask on technical matters like this given both his history of saying really silly things about space-related technologies and his enormous incentive to lie to attract investors.
- kergonath 9mo agoElon cannot change the laws of Physics, is not a serious person, and has no particular engineering skills. He is not authoritative on almost anything. He’s just cosplaying.
- Revolution1120 8mo agoConsider this: people chose the far right to ban marijuana legalization, only to have the far right controlled by drug-addicted tech buddies. Choosing the left simply means non-drug-using politicians tolerating drug use by the homeless; choosing the far right, on the other hand, directly allows self-producing and self-consuming drug dealers and users (whether it's actual drugs or the "spiritual opium" of social media) to rule America. You might think the far right is the kind of people who want you to return to a comfortable rural life, but the real far right rulers are the ones who want to spread the Chinese Satanism and the Chinese model of cyberpunk dystopia—with its tens of millions of cameras that can turn on your smart device at any time to take nude photos—to the United States.