5 ms·
What’s there not to like? Superconductors. Free electricity. No cooling necessary. Put those three together and maybe it’s possible to push physics to its limi
by sheepscreek 9mo ago
What’s there not to like? Superconductors. Free electricity. No cooling necessary.
Put those three together and maybe it’s possible to push physics to its limits. Faster networking, maybe 4x-5x capacity per unit compared to earth. Servicing is a pain, might be cheaper to just replace the hardware when a node goes bad.
But it mainly makes sense to those who have the capability and can do it cheaply (compared to the rest). There’s only one company that I can think of and that is SpaceX. They are closing in on (or passed) 8,000 satellites. Vertical integration means their cost-base will always be less than any competitor.
- DougN7 9mo agoWhy is there no cooling necessary?
- sheepscreek 9mo agoSpace is cold - 4 K. Superconductors.
- grim_io 9mo agoRepeating the word "superconductor" does not convince anyone of anything.
- roman_soldier 9mo ago[dead]
- sheepscreek 9mo agoI don’t care about convincing anyone. A question was asked and I answered the best I could with the time I had at hand. Also read by comment above that discusses WHY superconductors could be the key to cooler electronics in space.
- SideburnsOfDoom 9mo agoSpace is not cold. Space is not hot either. Temperature is a property of matter. Empty space does not have a temperature. It is also a perfect insulator for conduction and convection, and as for radiation: it's a problem because of the sun heating up objects via its radiation. This is the basics, I'm not an expert. But I don't think that you have anything useful at all to say here.
- pgalvin 9mo agoDo you mean to suggest that computer hardware does not need to be cooled when it is in space? Or that it is trivial and easier to do this in space compared to on Earth? I don’t understand either claim, if so.
- sheepscreek 9mo agoSuperconductors. Average temperature in space is around 4 K.
- cyberax 9mo agoEven assuming that this la-la-land idea has merit, the equilibrium temperature at the Earth's orbit is 250 Kelvin (around -20C). The space around the Earth is _hot_.
- sheepscreek 9mo agoThere are people literally working on accomplishing this. I don’t understand what’s with the arrogance and skepticism. Edit: Not trying to single out the above commenter, just the general “air” around this in all the comments. I honestly believed folks on HN are generally more open minded. There’s a trillion dollar merger happening the sole basis of which is the topic of this article. One of those companies put 6-8,000 satellites to space on its own dime. It’s not a stretch, had they put 5 GPUs in each of those satellites, they would have had a 40,000 GPU datacenter in space.
- cyberax 9mo ago> There are people literally working on accomplishing this. They're reinventing physics? Wow! I guess they'll just use Grok AI to fake the launch videos. Should be good enough for the MVP. For the superconductivity idea to work, the entire datacenter needs to be shielded both from sunlight and earthlight. This means a GINORMOUS sun shield to provide the required shadow. But wait, the datacenter will orbit the Earth, so it also will need to rotate constantly to keep itself in the shadow! Good luck with station-keeping. There's a reason the Webb Telescope (which is kept at a balmy 50K) had to be moved to a Sun-Earth Lagrange point. Or why previous infrared telescopes used slowly evaporating liquid helium for cooling. > I don’t understand what’s with the arrogance and skepticism. Because it's a fundamentally stupid idea. Stupid ideas should be laughed out. I'm not talking about "stupid because it's hard to do" but "stupid because of fundamental physical limitations".
- jasonpeacock 9mo ago> No cooling necessary. This is false, it's hard to cool things in space. Space (vacuum) is a very good insulator. 3 are ways to cool things (lose energy): - Conduction - Convection - Radiation In space, only radiation works, and it's the least efficient of those 3 options.
- roman_soldier 9mo ago[dead]
- sheepscreek 9mo agoSuperconductors.
- IshKebab 9mo agoMagnets. (We're just saying random physics things right?)
- emkoemko 9mo agoi think so, next is Quantum right?
- whh 9mo agoCould we use a constant stream of micro-asteroids as a heatsink?
- sheepscreek 9mo agoNo, just you. Superconductors don’t get hot. There is 0 resistance in superconducting mediums. Theoretically you could manufacture a lot of the electricity conducting medium out of a superconductor. Even the cheapest kind will superconduct in space (because it’s so cold). Radiation may be sufficient for the little heat that does get produced.
- ben_w 9mo agoIf/when we get high-performance superconducting computers, we wouldn't need to put the computers in space in the first place.
- tenuousemphasis 9mo agoYour exuberance for this topic is only matched by your lack of understanding about it.
- browningstreet 9mo agoDo you know the lifespan of those satellites? Do you know how many of those fall out (sorry, de-orbited) of space every year? Do you know the cost of sending up a payload of them? Do you know how much $$ you need to extract from those payloads to make the cost of sending them up make sense? Do you know how much they've lied about Starlink revenue and subscription counts?