Posted by simonebrunozzi 5 hours ago
Silliness aside, has anyone come up with a cooling system that would work well for a friggin data center in space? Or is it still all just a wishful thinking game, ignoring physics?
That cooling is already perfectly viable.
However at the temperatures chips operate at, because stuff on the ground is getting convective cooling as well as radiative, a radiator designed for LEO will reject slightly more heat on the ground than it would in orbit.
Perhaps you could explain in detail why you think the laws of physics have to be violated for space data centers to work.
As a Linux user, I can already build such a system quite trivially by installing Debian on a Raspberry Pi, attaching it to a weather balloon, and setting up a cron job to maintain orbit. The cooling is handled by opening a window. From Windows or Mac, the balloon could be accessed through built-in software.
If this is the case, I wouldn't be surprised to see them eventually support these kinds of regulations because it would enhance their moat (now earth orbit in addition to large capex for equipment and a sufficiently large user base).
But, as these things go, regulation isn't that much about where you put the computers, but about where you register your company, and where your customers are living.
In terms of regulation, it depends on the specifics. Sometimes it depends on where the customer lives, but even if it does, when a platform has no business operations in a region and there aren't international treaties between the consumer country and where they're operating from to resolve that sort of thing, the most the regulating country can do is block them.
If they have headquarters outside the EU, and only use data they've already acquired/processed to make money off of EU consumers from outside the EU, GDPR shouldn't be an issue for them in the same way.
And GDPR makes it harder for their competitors to catch up because it's harder for those competitors to get data.
It could be that the EU would block them if they wanted to host fb/etc... including ads, and didn't have a presence in the EU, but I'm not sure if that's the case.
Where you put something is completely irrelevant.
Where you put something, like a data center, can be relevant. If Meta didn't have a business presence in the EU, and operated their data centers outside of the EU, they wouldn't have been subject to GDPR in the same way they were.
The catches:
o Shielding from the sun's light and radiant heat.
o And efficiently radiating the system heat into space (since there is no air to convect or conduct the heat away).
The energy needed to achieve orbital altitude is vastly less than the energy needed to reach orbit. About 1kg of rocket fuel will carry a small explosive and some tiny steel spheres to LEO altitude. The projectile will not be in orbit; it won't have escape velocity -- in fact it will briefly hit zero velocity (wrt the earth) at orbital altitude and then fall back to earth.
The very large cloud of shrapnel created will encompass LEO orbital height for several seconds. If an orbiting datacenter passes through the cloud during those seconds, the shrapnel will be moving at orbital velocity wrt the datacenter. In other words, just one piece will take it out.
With relatively simple rocketry (and, these days, an abliterated LLM to aid you) a dedicated luddite would have several opportunities per day to hit one of a constellation of satellites. If they wanted one very specific satellite they'd have one or two chances a year. The targeting and steering is not hard -- the orbital paths are publicly known and easily observable; you can use RF time-of-flight to implement exceptionally precise position/altitude/velocity measurements from the rocket (no need for GPS -- use your own transmitters on the ground). This is not hard. And it will only get easier as AI advances.
*I strongly discourage anybody reading this from doing the above.*
I'm posting it in order to show people that anti-sabotage is absolutely not a selling point for orbital datacenters. If anything, they are far more vulnerable to luddite attacks. The people channelling billions into this tech know this too. So their motive is something else. I don't know what, but it isn't this. The math doesn't work.
You don't have to pack your energy generator into the same package where your compute would go, for laughably little energy. You can have a single cable go between a huge power plant and the data center.