[Dylan16807]

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.

[piloto_ciego]

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?

[Dylan16807]

> You still have to ask permission from places. That's the point. In orbit, nobody is going to care.

Launches need permission too.

> 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."

My "should" is a summary of the incentives if they acted reasonably. Without a crystal ball, don't be so confident they'll do something different.

And here's a version with no is or ought: Anyone whose goal is avoiding datacenter downsides, that could say "we forbid polluting and power grid draining datacenters here" but chooses to say "we forbid any datacenters here, go to space", is a moron. And anyone that doesn't have the power to say either is irrelevant.

> 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.

Companies almost always do what's cheaper. Your logic is incomprehensible here.

> 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

If the satellites self-powering counts as not buying electricity, then so does self-powering on land. Land in the middle of nowhere is very cheap, and so is the bureaucracy per acre when you're buying large chunks. It's less bureaucracy than rocket launches. And the technical stuff is a lot simpler on land than in space; suggesting you avoid technical stuff by using rockets is crazy.

> 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.

A baseless claim.

When you're happy with the middle of nowhere, building on land only requires a handful of approved sites on the entire planet. That's very achievable, and achievable faster than it takes to set up the production lines.

[piloto_ciego]

>Launches need permission too

Do you think the US government that's fawning over StarShield and the Golden dome is going to prohibit it? Of course not. And the permissions required for a launch or series of launches are VASTLY different than the permissions required to get something built. I spent my old life dealing with the FAA a lot. It's painful, but it's not terrible. You basically do their job for them by following their evaluation rules as you write your proposed operations up (they publish those in something that used to be called the 8900.1), then you wait and they stamp it or it goes through a series of revisions, but the time it takes is not immeasurably bad. Other departments and divisions of the government are not like that.

>And here's a version with no is or ought: Anyone whose goal is avoiding datacenter downsides, that could say "we forbid polluting and power grid draining datacenters here" but chooses to say "we forbid any datacenters here, go to space", is a moron. And anyone that doesn't have the power to say either is irrelevant.

I guess time will tell who is right. Still, the permitting costs and the time it takes will be the deciding factor in the long run. We're (that is the collective we as a people) are going to do this. We will have compute in space. Mark my words.

And "is a moron" is a bit of an overstep, unless you want to call the vast majority of people morons, which may be fair, but they're datacenters are the current zeitgeist's nuclear power plants in my experience.

> Companies almost always do what's cheaper. Your logic is incomprehensible here.

Opportunity cost is a big thing, and again, how many companies have you worked for? How many companies have you run? Just a window into my world. I just spent like 3 hours on the phone with the IRS today. It was cheaper for me to do that than to pay someone to do that, so I did. But I'll tell you, if I have to do this again I'm going to have my CPA do it. Time has a value too - it's almost more valuable than money. If you have to wait for the permitting process or just start launching datacenters ASAP, what's the "smart" choice? Well... I'd rather pay more now, and have that big compute without the headache than wait. I reckon it's not all or nothing either, we'll have space based datacenters and orbital datacenters and probably remote / rural datacenters too? But I bet we'll have them all.

We will see who is right here.

> A baseless claim.

Try to go get something big built somewhere, I dare ya. Shit, I live in Alaska which is notoriously permissive when it comes to development, I saw people TODAY on reddit squawking about a plan for a datacenter in the high arctic. I think the high arctic is a stupid place for a datacenter for a lot of reasons (basically most reasons other than cooling and cheap dirty power) and I don't think one would be built there for just logistics reasons alone, but people who will never go to those places (by the way, I've spent much of my adult life working in rural Alaska) will scream bloddy murder and fight tooth and nail to stop that project. I guarantee it.

How what kind of bandwidth are you saying a hypothetical West Texas datacenter would be able to get? How many batteries and how much solar? If you're going to take water from an already parched area, who has the water rights? You ever tried to get something built in the desert? These are all permitting hurdles that have to be stepped through point by point and approved by team after team of bureaucrats.

If the prize is "AGI++" or whatever we're calling super-intelligence in a few years, then the delay is more costly. But again, I just think, and no offense here, but you don't understand the logistical and permitting burden of building in the middle of nowhere. If you already own a rocket company, and you're launching something close to an orbital datacenter node already (starlink), then dealing with the permitting and stress from building outside Tempe, or the uncertainty of Tunisia or whatever is a nightmare. You're just going to go "up." And like I said, you can disbelieve me all you want, but I bet this is how things go. In fact I'm planning on it.

I bought land in the "middle of nowhere" last year to build our cabin on. I bought someplace with literally no-zoning/restrictions on purpose, but even on the land I bought I couldn't just pop up a multi-thousand square foot datacenter without a lengthy permitting process. Hell, even here in Alaska the permitting process for a running water is (rightfully) no joke.

I'm not trying to be an ass, but as someone who owns an (admittedly extremely small) business the opportunity cost of wading through the morass of paperwork and approval is just not worth it if I were trying to do something big. If I already had a space company, orbital datacenters would be the natural choice if I wanted more compute.

But again, we'll see who's right here.

[Dylan16807]

I know land permitting can be extensive, but my bet is that it's a small effort per petaflop if you go to the friendliest location in 5000 miles and do it in bulk.

And launching enough rockets to compare to such big datacenters not only needs flight permission, it needs a lot more launch pads. And you need big assembly lines no matter what, so you can't avoid land permitting.

The way I look at it, land for the actual datacenter isn't a delay. Start that permitting at an appropriate time in your process and it'll be done before you're actually ready to build.

But yeah, we'll see.

I'm also assuming designs with no water use for this hypothetical. For bandwidth, you can drag some fiber out there easily, and for big AI tasks you don't need a very high bandwidth to compute ratio. (If you needed tons of bandwidth space would also be a problem.) For batteries and solar, you need massive solar factories either way so this doesn't change things tremendously much.

> And "is a moron" is a bit of an overstep, unless you want to call the vast majority of people morons

I think most people would allow a datacenter that isn't using electricity from the grid, isn't consuming water, and isn't polluting the air or with noise. Am I wrong to think that?

[piloto_ciego]

actually, I'm even more convinced of my idea now, and I'm apparently not the only one:

https://wlockett.medium.com/the-spacex-xai-merger-is-a-giant...

But to you're point here, I disagree with this take:

> I think most people would allow a datacenter that isn't using electricity from the grid, isn't consuming water, and isn't polluting the air or with noise. Am I wrong to think that?

This may be uncharitable of me, but I don't think people will. People in the states generally hate AI. Hate it. And, frankly, most people don't know how any of this stuff works. They don't know how the inference gets done and they couldn't care enough to try to learn it. It's kind of like the meme "keep your government hands off my medicaid" that was going around a few years back. People just... totally don't get it and will hate what they hate. Even the people I agree with politically often are absolutely unable to envision anything other than the status quo. People can't even begin to imagine a world where there is no obligation or requirement to work. We could build that world and free ourselves from the tyranny of scarcity, but we're going to need AI to help, and the transition (what we're going through now) is going to be rocky.

Even now you can find people on here who say, "AI gets everything wrong" etc. People will fight musk building something simply because it is Musk. No other reason is needed. People don't actually give a damn about the environment. (this has been hard for me to swallow as an environmentalist at heart, even if I did work for an oil company for a bit). I learned this when I was doing some flying to some mines most directly. Which mines get opposed in the popular press? The mine that happened to be close to a place where a wealthy bank/family had property (a family lodge) that could be wrecked if the rivers got polluted. A hundred or two nautical miles away the same story was playing out with another piece of earth. That mine was unopposed because... well, nobody wealthy gave a damn and the people who inhabited the villages around it were poor. Why do people talk about ANWR like it's some sort of glorious beautiful location of resplendent natural beauty? Because someone said it once, and they're more stochastic parrot-like than the AI lol. I've been up there, lived up there, etc. I'd much rather we protected a few other places (especially some extraordinarily beautiful places that have been absolutely devastated by logging, but I digress), just saying, and ain't nobody going to go up there and spend time up there unless they need to for work.

That is more or less the level of engagement and understanding I expect people to have about this stuff. They read a few Musk tweets, thought, "good lord what a train wreck" (which is largely the right takeaway, to be fair), and will now oppose everything he does, even if it is actually something is probably good for the world. Generally, people don't care about where things come from, how their food gets here, the logistics, etc. I'm being overly broad, obviously some people care, but the amount is far smaller than you'd think, and largely, people will oppose datacenters in America because it is popular to oppose datacenters in America presently. It wouldn't matter if it was a datacenter dedicated to curing cancer and ending world hunger that was entirely sourced from green and conflict-free minerals, you'd have a non-trivial amount of people opposing it.

Now for this: >The way I look at it, land for the actual datacenter isn't a delay. Start that permitting at an appropriate time in your process and it'll be done before you're actually ready to build.

This is right in the "old world" way of thinking about it. Like, if this was the problem 5 years ago, this would be totally right. However, today these guys all view this as a race to AGI and more realistically ASI. If I had effectively infinite money (and Musk basically does), and I wanted to start building a datacenter in here in Alaska, if I built in town it could be 4-8 months to approve the permitting for construction. Double that timeline down south in more desirable parts of the country or with adequate infrastructure. If I'm in a race to build a datacenter as fast as possible, 4-8 months is billions of dollars on the back end when you're being your opposition.

[Dylan16807]

You make a compelling argument about datacenter NIMBY, though for competing with space that's still largely bypassed since you're not going for super low latency and being a thousand miles out of the way is fine.

For the delay part, how many months do you think it takes to set up a substantial satellite production line? And go through enough test versions that you're ready for prime time? I think it's a lot more than 16 months. With a bunch of money you can get enough land and permits for a decade of datacenters long before you can get your first gigawatt of satellites launched.