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by piloto_ciego 38 days ago
You don’t get it. Sorry, this is an “is-ought” thing. Sure we could mandate this. But are we going to? Do the systems exist that would actually mandate this?

Looking at things right now? I would say no. We will see, maybe in up my own ass on this, but I see a pretty big set of changes coming down the pike. Adapt or die (as unpalatable as that may seem).
1 comments
Dylan16807 38 days ago
If you don't mandate anything, then they're going to build the dirty one.

So what kind of laws would lead to the orbital option being preferred over the ground-based clean option?

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piloto_ciego 38 days ago
Well, arguably from the get go an orbital datacenter would be better. If launch costs were low enough I would say that as much industry as possible should be moved off planet, and we should make earth into a garden?
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Dylan16807 38 days ago
We're still doing all the mining and manufacturing on Earth, and there's so much empty land. The final product of self-powered datacenter is among the lowest priority of things to get away from us, and not an effective place to spend environmental mitigation money. And then when they re-enter they pollute pretty badly.
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piloto_ciego 38 days ago
Ok, this is not a reasoned argument anymore is it?
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Dylan16807 37 days ago
What do you think isn't reasoned?

You came up with an extremely arbitrary choice. I pointed out that if you were in a position to make that choice, you have much better options somewhere in between.

Then you talked about the more general idea of moving all industry off the planet, and sure that's nice but this is not the industry you want to start with, it should be one of the last ones you worry about.

If someone's offering to build space datacenters for free, probably go ahead and take them up on the offer. But if you have any influence on the decisionmaking, don't push for space datacenters, just push for non-polluting datacenters. You'll get better results for cheaper.

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piloto_ciego 36 days ago
You're still not getting it. You still have to ask permission from places. That's the point. In orbit, nobody is going to care. And you're using words like "should" - should has no place in this discussion. It's an "is-ought" thing. You're saying "they should behave this way" and I'm saying, "they're going to behave this other way."

You haven't reasoned through any of this, you're saying that they "should" do something because it will be cheaper/better/whatever. And that's not how it works - it was never how it worked, but it was less obvious in prior times.

There aren't really any better options. Your bottlenecks are power, land costs, technical stuff, and bureaucracy. In space you basically shortcut all of those problems except the technical ones, and (and this is unbelievably important too), it brings the costs of other things you're doing on orbit down. Sure you "could" build data centers in Arizona or whatever, but they're not going to because they'd have to ask permission, it'd be a permitting nightmare, etc.

These guys are also thinking about opportunity cost. So, say you can build AGI++ you just need more compute. What is the opportunity cost of building terrestrially if it takes you 4 years to build this with an extra year for legal requirements?

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