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biosphere interference from ground infrastructure? any idea the ground infrastructure it requires to support space based compute operations? i have a feeling t

by jatora 5mo ago

biosphere interference from ground infrastructure? any idea the ground infrastructure it requires to support space based compute operations? i have a feeling that is comparable if not more impactful you also shrug off cooling. this is not a solved problem in any way. its not even approachable as of yet. the vast size of the radiators will be hilarious regardless. you ignore power generation. solar is not an option. so we also need nuclear reactors for these orbital data centers. thats cool spacex can just branch out into nuclear too! love the idea of unmanned nuclear orbiting behemoths. speaking of orbital.. what is their orbit? do they go out to Lagrange points? hilariously far? or do they stay close? hilariously fuel intensive to stay out of the atmosphere for such massive structures? but hey, maybe we distribute spaceX-AI gpu's across starlinks. a couple solar panels and a tesla battery per gpu. all launched there by spacex 'all mass and energy available is outside of earth' Yeah, and out of range for compute data connections too. I don't agree with the feasibility or ANY sort of practicality to this whatsoever. Im all for going for it, but I wish everyone could just admit that we're doing it because it's cool, not because it's useful. I get why Elon wont say that, but not us.

joha4270 5mo ago
Your feelings are obviously your own, but a Starlink terminal isn't that big and can transfer quite a lot of tokens. Every single satellite has sufficient cooling for its power production, otherwise they would be frying. Waste heat from a GPU is not materially different from waste heat from an amplifier. That's not cooling entire racks, but I don't think anybody talks about putting entire racks in space anymore. I'm very much pro nuclear, but a solar cell in a sun synchronous orbit is pretty great too and eliminates most battery requirements I very much doubt the economics of this makes sense, but I don't think a lot of your criticism is valid.
- throw310822 5mo ago
  > Every single satellite has sufficient cooling for its power production But here we're talking about putting data centers in space. It means stuffing as many gpus as possible into each satellite and running them at constant max power.
  - mavhc 5mo ago
    https://terafab.ai/ https://terafab.ai/ has a diagram of the proposed satellites
    - benj111 5mo ago
      "1 billion Tesla Optimus robots" Christ. I thought we had seen the last of the Musk-tards.
  - ben_w 5mo ago
    They're talking about launching a million satellites, not one massive satellite. I don't think they can avoid a Kessler cascade at that scale, but if launch costs were cheap enough (questionable because Musk habitually overpromises and underdelivers, but not inconceivable as sometimes he succeeds too) then patterning each of those million on Starlink satellites is essentially viable.
    - throw310822 5mo ago
      The thing is, the infrastructure needed to power and cool each of those satellites makes it economically absurd given that what they collectively do can also be done by a few data centers on earth.
      - ben_w 5mo ago
        As per another comment, power is a wash either way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48119298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48119298 Cooling per unit is also basically fine, people make incorrect associations with the ISS without removing the bits of the ISS that aren't computers, including all the humans who die from heat at lower temperatures than chips can run at. It comes down to the price to orbit vs. the price of not going to orbit. I don't trust Musk for the former, because even with the impressive demonstrations seen in Starship, they need to make that vehicle fully reusable to get the cost low enough to be an improvement over batteries and more PV and scattering the same count of units randomly around the desert in Arizona, Nevada, etc.

by jatora 5mo ago

joha4270 5mo ago

Your feelings are obviously your own, but a Starlink terminal isn't that big and can transfer quite a lot of tokens. Every single satellite has sufficient cooling for its power production, otherwise they would be frying. Waste heat from a GPU is not materially different from waste heat from an amplifier. That's not cooling entire racks, but I don't think anybody talks about putting entire racks in space anymore. I'm very much pro nuclear, but a solar cell in a sun synchronous orbit is pretty great too and eliminates most battery requirements I very much doubt the economics of this makes sense, but I don't think a lot of your criticism is valid.

throw310822 5mo ago
> Every single satellite has sufficient cooling for its power production But here we're talking about putting data centers in space. It means stuffing as many gpus as possible into each satellite and running them at constant max power.
- mavhc 5mo ago
  https://terafab.ai/ https://terafab.ai/ has a diagram of the proposed satellites
  - benj111 5mo ago
    "1 billion Tesla Optimus robots" Christ. I thought we had seen the last of the Musk-tards.
- ben_w 5mo ago
  They're talking about launching a million satellites, not one massive satellite. I don't think they can avoid a Kessler cascade at that scale, but if launch costs were cheap enough (questionable because Musk habitually overpromises and underdelivers, but not inconceivable as sometimes he succeeds too) then patterning each of those million on Starlink satellites is essentially viable.
  - throw310822 5mo ago
    The thing is, the infrastructure needed to power and cool each of those satellites makes it economically absurd given that what they collectively do can also be done by a few data centers on earth.
    - ben_w 5mo ago
      As per another comment, power is a wash either way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48119298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48119298 Cooling per unit is also basically fine, people make incorrect associations with the ISS without removing the bits of the ISS that aren't computers, including all the humans who die from heat at lower temperatures than chips can run at. It comes down to the price to orbit vs. the price of not going to orbit. I don't trust Musk for the former, because even with the impressive demonstrations seen in Starship, they need to make that vehicle fully reusable to get the cost low enough to be an improvement over batteries and more PV and scattering the same count of units randomly around the desert in Arizona, Nevada, etc.