5 ms·

>Planetary Overlord* AGI is nice, yet not necessary. The orbit filled with Starlink descendants and datacenters will be the it. Anybody else wanting to get the

by trhway 5mo ago

>Planetary Overlord* AGI is nice, yet not necessary. The orbit filled with Starlink descendants and datacenters will be the it. Anybody else wanting to get there would have to get permission. SpaceX/Musk have all the components for it to happen - from Starship to AI (including the army of robots on the ground). The governmental power/sovereignty of US will be used as a stepping stone (that is the strategy described in the Palantir's Karp's book "Technological Republic") for such global techno-feudal regime establishment.

customguy 5mo ago
Kinda like Krikkit, but except for a close knit community of people who can sing, and sing about how much they love their family and whatnot in addition to singing about how much they have to destroy the universe, it's just a bunch of stuck up weirdos who don't like themselves and each other, and have no goal other than somehow, magically, getting away from who and what they are. People where the idea of them singing a happy, compassionate tune conjures something involving motion capture or deepfakes. Why are we suffering fools steering us into the worst of all possible worlds? Are we hoping for some kind of integer overflow?
dgellow 5mo ago
The discourse on this topic is at the point where I have no idea if people are serious or satirical. Please tell me you don’t seriously believe data centers in spaces is a realistic idea
- trhway 5mo ago
  I don't "believe". I'm arithmetically sure that it is going to happen, and it will beat the ground based on pretty much all metrics. Some of my comments with napkin numbers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46882199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46882199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46880680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46880680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46880486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46880486 Just a very rough primitive illustration - a land for a house in SV is like a $1M, and putting a 10 ton house into space at $100/kg - $1M. Existence of supposedly cheap land somewhere (with not much infrastructure usually) doesn't help as you put your computer nodes into a datacenter building with all the required infrastructure which cost more than the SV land on a sq foot basis. And that is without consideration of how powerful a weapon is the energy generated by a humongous field of solar panels in space. Remember Reagan's Star Wars? Nuclear explosions as a source of power for the direct energy weapons like lasers, etc. Well, you wouldn't need the nukes anymore. Just redirect a bit of power from your compute nodes. And as i already wrote, the large transnational companies will have to take care about their own defense themselves https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47981423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47981423 - one more "feudal" aspect of the coming techno-feudalism. Defense is one of the most important sovereign aspects, and upon acquiring it the transnationals will be able to acquire pretty fast the other sovereign aspects. Like enforcement of the Criminal Code of the Mars Colony - again pretty rough primitive illustration of course. The feudal Europe emerged on the outskirts of the Roman Empire, and in our world the new order will be emerging faster on the outskirts (i.e. where reach and strength of the existing order is weaker), the space being one such "outskirts" dimension and the AI/hypercompute virtual world being the other. To the commenter below with reddit link : they use human env temp for heat radiation estimate. That lowers the numbers and requires AC equipment. Ie they estimate space station, not datacenter
  - phs318u 5mo ago
    But what do you do with all the waste energy? All those MW and GW have to end up somewhere and radiation into a vacuum is the hardest way to dump heat.
    - trhway 5mo ago
      At 70-80C (working temp of silicon chips) 1m2 radiates 700-800W, i.e. the heat of 1 GPU like H200 without any need for any cooling equipment beside the radiator itself( and may be some dumb heatpiping) . To acquire that energy you'd need 3-4m2 of solar panels. So a datacenter would be a large field of solar panels with a smaller field of heat radiators in their shadow. To the commenter below: yes, exactly, this is where my thinking on that started at the cryptocurrency boom - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26289423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26289423 - as you don't need close connection between mining GPUs. For AI you'd need to cluster several together while still overall scheme is the same. >what the equilibrium temperature of a black planar surface is at a given distance from the sun. it is 120C at the Earth orbit. So you do need to have some reflection, either back through the solar panels, or the radiators to have a reflective back toward the solar panels in the shadow of which they are to be located.
      - fc417fc802 5mo ago
        You can probably (I haven't verified this) omit separate radiators and just use the back of the solar panels. Effectively you're describing mounting each H200 to the back of a 4 m^2 solar array at which point I suspect the equilibrium temperature will fall within an acceptable range. In fact the H200 and electricity are both entirely irrelevant here - the core question is what the equilibrium temperature of a black planar surface is at a given distance from the sun.
        kreelman 5mo ago
        Would it be feasible to put several JWST-like stirling engines somewhere in the mix to use up some of that heat and turn it into some kind of useful energy? .... Perhaps running pumps that move around coolant passing over the cubes of GPUs? .. That would be extra weight/cost into orbit though... Also, don't solar panels have reduced efficiency when they're hot? And having anything hot surely increases failure rates.. with metals getting closer to melting points...?
onion2k 5mo ago
Anybody else wanting to get there would have to get permission. The USA, China, and Russia have all successfully tested anti-satellite weapons. If anything, any company that operates a constellation of space-based data centres would need 'permission' to keep them working.
- trhway 5mo ago
  beside of how easy it is to destroy from orbit the anti-satellite missiles coming out from the atmosphere, you're probably missing the fact that any object in orbit is basically a warhead with TNT equivalent of at least 6x its mass. For example the 150 tons payload of just one Starship will have close to 1 kiloton TNT equivalent - 5% of Hiroshima - if dropped from orbit.
  - onion2k 5mo ago
    Something being deorbited will probably break up into relatively harmless pieces that mostly burn up though, and there's no nuclear material involved so even if a massive chunk hits the Earth that's not going to have a huge impact. Based on ocean coverage there's a 0.7 probability that it'll just make a big splash. Should we ever get to a point where a country is considering shooting down space datacentres, considerations about the impact on Earth is unlikely to stop them.
    - trhway 5mo ago
      >will probably break up if it is designed to breakup. And not if it isn't. >no nuclear material involved that is the beauty. No contamination. >that's not going to have a huge impact. in my comment i already specified the TNT equivalent of such an impact. >there's a 0.7 probability It isn't a matter of probability. You can deorbit with high precision, and pretty much hit any desired target on the ground if you have thousands of objects in space on a bunch of various orbits. >Should we ever get to a point where a country is considering shooting down space datacentres, considerations about the impact on Earth is unlikely to stop them. 13 ton GBU-57 reaching M 2-3 gets 200 feet deep. De-orbitted 1-2 ton steel rods will have about the same effect - ie. you can hit many strategic objects of your attacker. And having in orbit, just in case, a ball or rod of 30-50 tons will get you a small tactical nuke equivalent.
UncleMeat 5mo ago
"Just put datacenters in space" might be the very dumbest recurring idea coming from these AI CEOs. It seems to be based entirely on "I dunno, that seems cool." Solar energy isn't stupendously more available in space than on earth. Even if somehow you get super robots that are able to perform the continuously required maintenance and installation of new equipment, transporting materials into space is very expensive. Venting waste heat in space is incredibly difficult. Dealing with some unexpected situation that requires manual intervention becomes impossible.

by trhway 5mo ago

customguy 5mo ago

Kinda like Krikkit, but except for a close knit community of people who can sing, and sing about how much they love their family and whatnot in addition to singing about how much they have to destroy the universe, it's just a bunch of stuck up weirdos who don't like themselves and each other, and have no goal other than somehow, magically, getting away from who and what they are. People where the idea of them singing a happy, compassionate tune conjures something involving motion capture or deepfakes. Why are we suffering fools steering us into the worst of all possible worlds? Are we hoping for some kind of integer overflow?

dgellow 5mo ago

The discourse on this topic is at the point where I have no idea if people are serious or satirical. Please tell me you don’t seriously believe data centers in spaces is a realistic idea

trhway 5mo ago
I don't "believe". I'm arithmetically sure that it is going to happen, and it will beat the ground based on pretty much all metrics. Some of my comments with napkin numbers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46882199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46882199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46880680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46880680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46880486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46880486 Just a very rough primitive illustration - a land for a house in SV is like a $1M, and putting a 10 ton house into space at $100/kg - $1M. Existence of supposedly cheap land somewhere (with not much infrastructure usually) doesn't help as you put your computer nodes into a datacenter building with all the required infrastructure which cost more than the SV land on a sq foot basis. And that is without consideration of how powerful a weapon is the energy generated by a humongous field of solar panels in space. Remember Reagan's Star Wars? Nuclear explosions as a source of power for the direct energy weapons like lasers, etc. Well, you wouldn't need the nukes anymore. Just redirect a bit of power from your compute nodes. And as i already wrote, the large transnational companies will have to take care about their own defense themselves https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47981423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47981423 - one more "feudal" aspect of the coming techno-feudalism. Defense is one of the most important sovereign aspects, and upon acquiring it the transnationals will be able to acquire pretty fast the other sovereign aspects. Like enforcement of the Criminal Code of the Mars Colony - again pretty rough primitive illustration of course. The feudal Europe emerged on the outskirts of the Roman Empire, and in our world the new order will be emerging faster on the outskirts (i.e. where reach and strength of the existing order is weaker), the space being one such "outskirts" dimension and the AI/hypercompute virtual world being the other. To the commenter below with reddit link : they use human env temp for heat radiation estimate. That lowers the numbers and requires AC equipment. Ie they estimate space station, not datacenter
- phs318u 5mo ago
  But what do you do with all the waste energy? All those MW and GW have to end up somewhere and radiation into a vacuum is the hardest way to dump heat.
  - trhway 5mo ago
    At 70-80C (working temp of silicon chips) 1m2 radiates 700-800W, i.e. the heat of 1 GPU like H200 without any need for any cooling equipment beside the radiator itself( and may be some dumb heatpiping) . To acquire that energy you'd need 3-4m2 of solar panels. So a datacenter would be a large field of solar panels with a smaller field of heat radiators in their shadow. To the commenter below: yes, exactly, this is where my thinking on that started at the cryptocurrency boom - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26289423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26289423 - as you don't need close connection between mining GPUs. For AI you'd need to cluster several together while still overall scheme is the same. >what the equilibrium temperature of a black planar surface is at a given distance from the sun. it is 120C at the Earth orbit. So you do need to have some reflection, either back through the solar panels, or the radiators to have a reflective back toward the solar panels in the shadow of which they are to be located.
    - fc417fc802 5mo ago
      You can probably (I haven't verified this) omit separate radiators and just use the back of the solar panels. Effectively you're describing mounting each H200 to the back of a 4 m^2 solar array at which point I suspect the equilibrium temperature will fall within an acceptable range. In fact the H200 and electricity are both entirely irrelevant here - the core question is what the equilibrium temperature of a black planar surface is at a given distance from the sun.
      - kreelman 5mo ago
        Would it be feasible to put several JWST-like stirling engines somewhere in the mix to use up some of that heat and turn it into some kind of useful energy? .... Perhaps running pumps that move around coolant passing over the cubes of GPUs? .. That would be extra weight/cost into orbit though... Also, don't solar panels have reduced efficiency when they're hot? And having anything hot surely increases failure rates.. with metals getting closer to melting points...?

onion2k 5mo ago

Anybody else wanting to get there would have to get permission. The USA, China, and Russia have all successfully tested anti-satellite weapons. If anything, any company that operates a constellation of space-based data centres would need 'permission' to keep them working.

trhway 5mo ago
beside of how easy it is to destroy from orbit the anti-satellite missiles coming out from the atmosphere, you're probably missing the fact that any object in orbit is basically a warhead with TNT equivalent of at least 6x its mass. For example the 150 tons payload of just one Starship will have close to 1 kiloton TNT equivalent - 5% of Hiroshima - if dropped from orbit.
- onion2k 5mo ago
  Something being deorbited will probably break up into relatively harmless pieces that mostly burn up though, and there's no nuclear material involved so even if a massive chunk hits the Earth that's not going to have a huge impact. Based on ocean coverage there's a 0.7 probability that it'll just make a big splash. Should we ever get to a point where a country is considering shooting down space datacentres, considerations about the impact on Earth is unlikely to stop them.
  - trhway 5mo ago
    >will probably break up if it is designed to breakup. And not if it isn't. >no nuclear material involved that is the beauty. No contamination. >that's not going to have a huge impact. in my comment i already specified the TNT equivalent of such an impact. >there's a 0.7 probability It isn't a matter of probability. You can deorbit with high precision, and pretty much hit any desired target on the ground if you have thousands of objects in space on a bunch of various orbits. >Should we ever get to a point where a country is considering shooting down space datacentres, considerations about the impact on Earth is unlikely to stop them. 13 ton GBU-57 reaching M 2-3 gets 200 feet deep. De-orbitted 1-2 ton steel rods will have about the same effect - ie. you can hit many strategic objects of your attacker. And having in orbit, just in case, a ball or rod of 30-50 tons will get you a small tactical nuke equivalent.

UncleMeat 5mo ago

"Just put datacenters in space" might be the very dumbest recurring idea coming from these AI CEOs. It seems to be based entirely on "I dunno, that seems cool." Solar energy isn't stupendously more available in space than on earth. Even if somehow you get super robots that are able to perform the continuously required maintenance and installation of new equipment, transporting materials into space is very expensive. Venting waste heat in space is incredibly difficult. Dealing with some unexpected situation that requires manual intervention becomes impossible.