[trhway]

>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.

[onion2k]

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]

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.

[ben_w]

> beside of how easy it is to destroy from orbit the anti-satellite missiles coming out from the atmosphere,

No state has deployed a kinetic or explosive weapon from orbit to strike a ballistic missile or launch vehicle during ascent.

No operational system exists where satellites are used as strike platforms against Earth-launched rockets in real time.

Russia has done ground-to-orbit anti-satellite missiles though.

Any directed energy system shooting up would be strictly easier than one pointing down, not only because of thermal issues and power supply but also because it's easier to hide ground installations than satellites.

[onion2k]

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]

>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.

[leonidasrup]

"Project Thor was an idea for a weapons system that launches telephone pole-sized kinetic projectiles made from tungsten from Earth's orbit to damage targets on the ground."

"In the case of the system mentioned in the 2003 Air Force report above, a 6.1 by 0.3 metres (20 ft × 1 ft) tungsten cylinder impacting at Mach 10 (11,200 ft/s; 3,400 m/s) has kinetic energy equivalent to approximately 11.5 tons of TNT (48 GJ)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment

[trhway]

Yes, you guys are right about Mach 10, i missed that the final speed is so low, i used some calculations from somewhat similar, yet different setup. So, i'm about 5x mistaken on TNT equivalent.

I still believe that it is possible to do noticeably better, yet it would take some technological effort - somewhat similar to how Russian supercavitating torpedo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VA-111_Shkval does or like some hypersonic weapons do by creating a plasma cloud ahead.

Even more - we can create plasma channel by using tandem schema. The first, smaller rod flies down heating and ionizing the air thus "paving" the way for the second, main, much larger rod. The delay between them is such that the main rod passes almost immediately right behind the second in the a-max (maximum deceleration) layer between 3 and 5 km altitude. If they enter 5km at 20 Mach, the first will slow down to almost 10 Mach at 3km, so the main should enter the 5km altitude 0.2 seconds behind the first. The wind speed at those altitudes is 10-20m/s, thus the channel has to be only about 2-4m wide. I actually have been thinking about this from the other side - a large gun for space launch.

[onion2k]

De-orbitted 1-2 ton steel rods will have about the same effect - ie. you can hit many strategic objects of your attacker.

The orbital kinetic strike weapons that have been proposed in the past are usually 2 ton titanium rods that would hit at about Mach 10, and even with that level of force they've been dismissed as less useful than ballistic warheads. Things falling from space just aren't as dangerous as people tend to assume.

[customguy]

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]

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]

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=46880680 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 - 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

[hattmall]

You would need like 1,000,000,000,000 SQFT of solar panels to even begin to approximate a space based directed energy weapon that has a fraction of the effect of a nuclear weapon. Tens of thousands of times more than all that have ever been produced on earth. And then you have to move them to space.

[trhway]

nuclear was the only available solution at the time and an overkill. The lasers in SDI are MW scale. Even at 10% (and modern solid state lasers have better than 10% efficiency) we're talking low tens of MW per laser. A 10MW is 40K m2 of solar panels - 200m x 200m, may be like 100-150 tons, one Starship payload.

[gilbetron]

Terrible math is terrible.

Better napkin math that is still being unrealistic compared to the true costs of space-based datacenters: https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/1quvbi4/sel...

Just contemplate what the radiator array and solar array needed a 1GW datacenter and all the cooling equipment and coolant, and imagine the harsh environment in space degrading it constantly.

The only point of the space-based datacenter idea is to pump the Spacex IPO

[ben_w]

> 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.

This is a terrible argument, given that space has zero infrastructure.

Once you can break a data centre into a million sub-units and spread them over a sun-synchronous orbit or ten and cool them radiatively, you can also spread those sub-units on desert land with no water or electricity and cool them radiatively.

The units on the ground would look about 6x larger because ground experiences night and even deserts have clouds, but their PV also lasts 30+ years rather than burning up every 5 years or so, which means the factory making the PV to supply them is the same size.

The main thing you save on is batteries. Tesla already supplies enough batteries that it can manage a "mere" one million 25kW compute modules.

> 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 - one more "feudal" aspect of the coming techno-feudalism.

While true, attacking up is easier than attacking down. Anything on the ground has a massive heat-sink all around it, the stuff in space does not. Right now, an attack up is already only limited by the supply of adaptive optics to get through atmospheric distortion.

[trhway]

>you can also spread those sub-units on desert land with no water or electricity and cool them radiatively.

no, you can't.

>attacking up is easier than attacking down.

no.

[ben_w]

Asserting the contrary is not an argument.

Nothing prevents SpaceX or anyone else from buying up the right to put these things on cheap desert land. They don't even need to own the land, just the right to wheel these things out on a trailer or a helicopter and leave them there.

A desert is significantly less harsh than space. If your radiator is sized for space, it's overkill in an atmosphere.

And for your edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNmbvaUzC8Q

[trhway]

>If your radiator is sized for space, it's overkill in an atmosphere.

no. Again totally wrong.

The 20-40C air surrounding the radiator radiates at the radiator too. This is why a human immediately gets stone cold in space while not in the atmosphere - our body radiates away about 900W and receives 800W+ back from the atmosphere - our internal heat 'generation has to cover only the difference - less than 100W usually.

You probably meant forced convection cooling. That requires additional machinery. And that additional machinery is a significant part why ground based datacenters such expensive to build and operate.

To the comment below:

>The planet underneath anything in low orbit also does this, making this argument irrelevant.

no. Again, totally wrong. You've just stated that a human in LEO wouldn't get immediately cold when exposed to space. Just think about it for a second. And after that plug the numbers in thermodynamic calculator. You'll see your error.

>Likewise, the fact that convection exists even without the adjective "forced".

no. Again, wrong. Non-forced convection is pretty small. Use the calculator. And you'll understand why datacenters use forced convection.

[boc]

It's pretty easy to de-orbit satellites or space-based stations. An SM-3 could smoke the ISS pretty easily, and they cost like 10M and we have thousands around the oceans.

[trhway]

>they cost like 10M ... thousands around the oceans.

Starlink numbers already in thousands (and cost much cheaper than 10M). And that is still using Falcon, not Starship. And a ground launched missile would be easily "cooked", once it exits the atmosphere, by a direct energy weapon - very easy in space.

[phs318u]

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]

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 - 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]

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]

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...?

[UncleMeat]

"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.