Posted by simonebrunozzi 5 hours ago
Solar & wind can’t power industry.
The pro-nuclear propaganda is suspiciously associated with people with a history of also wanting to build nuclear weapons. The Liberal Party of Australia is an example — they seem very interested in overpriced nuclear power and obtaining nuclear powered subs capable of launching nuclear tipped missiles.
Cost comparison: https://chatgpt.com/share/6af8ce92-bd10-83ec-88be-1f61051091...
Nuclear needs to get down to a capex of maybe $3/W to have a chance. This is a very big ask.
Vibing with the default assumption is cheap, and it should be cheap. While we have no reason to believe otherwise there is no reason to go looking for a lot of evidence for why we are right. Everybody believes so, so why bother convincing us right? Vibes are enough until proven otherwise.
Vibing against the default assumption is expensive, and it should be expensive. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all that. Your job is to prove that you are right, that the traditional wisdom is wrong, and that everybody has to change their mind. Vibing in this direction is not nearly enough. In fact, the vibes in this direction are worth nothing.
https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(26)00362-4
Their blogpost is more "marketing-ish" but the videos are worth a watch too:
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/go...
Should we consider orbit to be outside of terrestrial tax jurisdiction?
The majority of the cost of putting these data centres into orbit would be borne by terrestrial jurisdictions. The places that built institutions, funded education, provide medical care, etc. for the people who built these things. The environmental impact of building these data centres and launching them will be paid by those living on Earth's surface.
On Earth, we often fail to recoup many of these costs because of out-sourcing, but at least some other jurisdiction benefits. If a poor country is lifted up by the benefits of out-sourcing, at least some good has been done. If we let billionaires simply blast off and evade taxes, that's a net loss to the societies that made this possible with no benefit to anyone but the billionaires. That's fundamentally wrong.
Space may belong to no one nation, but neither is it true that space belongs to no one at all. The space around Earth belongs to all of humanity. Orbital data centres should pay terrestrial taxes. It's not clear where those taxes should go, but we need to hammer out the laws to make sure they are paid.
Is this already done?
I mean, the US could have a rational process of building new energy infrastructure (which should be only solar, wind and nuclear imo) but the actual process is opportunistic and haphazard. So it's not strange to see the NIMBYs biting them. It's like "well if you hadn't a d*k, this might not be happening to you..."