Google and SpaceX are in talks to build data centers in orbit, pitching space as the future home for AI compute, even as costs today remain far higher than on the ground.
Good. The more stuff we can get off this fragile world the better off it will be.
Yes, it’s hard. Now at least. But at some point we can source the materials out there instead of having to launch every bit of it and that’ll make everything easier in space.
No more manufacturing polluting the air. And once we can source the materials to build, it’s a simple matter to source the materials needed for manufacturing as well.
The biggest complaint of EVs is the mining of the parts needed to make it.
Imagine no longer needing to mine the earth for materials.
That’s 5 words and trillions of dollars worth of start-up cost.
If we’re so dead-set on flying servers out to LEO so they can be micro-meteor target practice, maybe we could leverage the no-water, solar powered setup we’d have to do there to get better DCs on earth here, first. We’d have gravity and thus convection on our side as we look at cooling, not to mention the vastly better proximity to supply chains during the proof-of-concept phase.
It’s really not. Solid state devices don’t care one whit about gravity or any lack thereof. And do you have ANY idea how many small things we have today to make our lives better that are all offshoots of the original space race? Velcro. Memory foam. Just to name two of them.
I swear, some people just refuse to see the forest because of all the trees in the way.
There are multiple trillions of dollars worth of materials in the asteroid belt.
Also, solar works best when there’s no atmosphere between the emitter and the collector. Not to mention there are orbital vectors available that would keep the collectors in full sunlight permanently.
No massive battery farm needed. No need to go dig up all that material and continue destroying the environment here by doing so.
Why are there so many luddites using technology like the Internet these days???
The extremes of space and the engineering of components goes far beyond just gravity. While there is no doubt that new technology would be developed this is not the government doing it. You really think they are going to give this technology away for free like the US government did? Highly unlikely.
It is not about refusing to see the forest because harvesting asteroids, then returning them to our planet for use on the ground is bonkers level aspirations. It would make more sense to keep them in space for manufacturing, but we are very far away from any sort of space building platform that could process raw materials into a finished product.
Energy from the sun is indeed abundant in space, but the costs of sending materials up will remain prohibitive until we no longer need rockets. That type of technology is still very far away although some proposals like a launch rail cannon, space elevator, or ablative laser propulsion could eventually solve this issue.
You also are missing just how fast technology is moving. Current AI centers expect to swap out hardware every three years or so. Who will be up in space swapping out the hardware of possibly millions of satellites. This is another added cost because realistically they will just have to keep launching.
You last comment completely misunderstands who the luddites where and what they wanted. They were against technology taking away livelihood not the technology itself. Your comment completely ignores this reality and paints luddites as something entirely different.
NASA did do a lot of it directly so no. There were subcontractors of course, but they were usually responsible for building specific things not the research that generally came from public universities and NASA.
SpaceX is not sharing their technology in the same way NASA did. In fact, they aren’t even patenting their tech as to keep it secret.
Good. The more stuff we can get off this fragile world the better off it will be.
Yes, it’s hard. Now at least. But at some point we can source the materials out there instead of having to launch every bit of it and that’ll make everything easier in space.
No more manufacturing polluting the air. And once we can source the materials to build, it’s a simple matter to source the materials needed for manufacturing as well.
The biggest complaint of EVs is the mining of the parts needed to make it.
Imagine no longer needing to mine the earth for materials.
That’s 5 words and trillions of dollars worth of start-up cost.
If we’re so dead-set on flying servers out to LEO so they can be micro-meteor target practice, maybe we could leverage the no-water, solar powered setup we’d have to do there to get better DCs on earth here, first. We’d have gravity and thus convection on our side as we look at cooling, not to mention the vastly better proximity to supply chains during the proof-of-concept phase.
It’s really not. Solid state devices don’t care one whit about gravity or any lack thereof. And do you have ANY idea how many small things we have today to make our lives better that are all offshoots of the original space race? Velcro. Memory foam. Just to name two of them.
I swear, some people just refuse to see the forest because of all the trees in the way.
There are multiple trillions of dollars worth of materials in the asteroid belt.
Also, solar works best when there’s no atmosphere between the emitter and the collector. Not to mention there are orbital vectors available that would keep the collectors in full sunlight permanently.
No massive battery farm needed. No need to go dig up all that material and continue destroying the environment here by doing so.
Why are there so many luddites using technology like the Internet these days???
Seriously? that’s the best you could do?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies
I was just going off memory. And I’m turning 50 soon. Sooo. 🤣
The extremes of space and the engineering of components goes far beyond just gravity. While there is no doubt that new technology would be developed this is not the government doing it. You really think they are going to give this technology away for free like the US government did? Highly unlikely.
It is not about refusing to see the forest because harvesting asteroids, then returning them to our planet for use on the ground is bonkers level aspirations. It would make more sense to keep them in space for manufacturing, but we are very far away from any sort of space building platform that could process raw materials into a finished product.
Energy from the sun is indeed abundant in space, but the costs of sending materials up will remain prohibitive until we no longer need rockets. That type of technology is still very far away although some proposals like a launch rail cannon, space elevator, or ablative laser propulsion could eventually solve this issue.
You also are missing just how fast technology is moving. Current AI centers expect to swap out hardware every three years or so. Who will be up in space swapping out the hardware of possibly millions of satellites. This is another added cost because realistically they will just have to keep launching.
You last comment completely misunderstands who the luddites where and what they wanted. They were against technology taking away livelihood not the technology itself. Your comment completely ignores this reality and paints luddites as something entirely different.
The government didn’t do it before either. They contracted private firms to do it, like Boeing and Rocketdyne…
NASA did do a lot of it directly so no. There were subcontractors of course, but they were usually responsible for building specific things not the research that generally came from public universities and NASA.
SpaceX is not sharing their technology in the same way NASA did. In fact, they aren’t even patenting their tech as to keep it secret.