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Not disagreeing with you at all: that physics fact always come up. My honest question is: if it's a perfect thermos, what does, for example, the ISS do with the
by TacticalCoder 8mo ago
Not disagreeing with you at all: that physics fact always come up. My honest question is: if it's a perfect thermos, what does, for example, the ISS do with the heat generated by computers and humans burning calories? The ISS is equipped with a mechanism to radiate excess heat into space? Or is the ISS slowly heating up but it's not a problem?
- vidarh 8mo agoThe ISS has giant heat sinks[1]. Those heat sinks are necessary for just the modest heat generated on the ISS, and should give an idea of what a sattelite full of GPU's might require... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Control_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Contro...
- cluckindan 8mo agoLet me google that for you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Control_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Contro...
- jamiek88 8mo agoThe ISS has MASSIVE radiators. Most of its volume is radiator. 900 cubic meters of space 2500 square meters of radiator.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- stouset 8mo agoThe TL;DR is they radiate it into space via large, high surface area arms that stick out of the station.
- breput 8mo agoMassive radiators. In this photo[0], all of the light gray panels are thermal radiators. Note how they are nearly as large as the solar panels, which gives you an idea about the scale needed to radiate away 3-12 people's worth of heat (~1200 watts) + the heat generated by equipment. [0] https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/jsc2021e064215_alt/jsc2021e064215_alt~large.jpg?w=1920&h=1173 https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/jsc2021e064215_alt/jsc2...
- OrvalWintermute 8mo agoI agree, all the good papers definitely talk about custom designed radiators being used on the dark sides of data center in space.
- gpt5 8mo agoThe ISS is designed to emit 126kW of heat radiation between the active cooking systems and the solar array cooling system.
- adastra22 8mo agoWhich is less than a single rack of GPUs.