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by eigenspace 12 days ago
I also sounds amazing until you remember how hard it is to cool something when your only option is radiative cooling.
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You could also transfer the heat to tungsten rods and drop them on rivaling earth-bound data centers.
Why tungsten? In terms of thermal conductivity, It’s way worse than silver and copper and on par with good aluminium alloys. Those are cheaper and much lighter (so again much cheaper to put into orbit).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment

The idea is to use tungsten because of the high melting point and hardness so that it survives re-entry in order to best strike the rival datacentre.

This has zero advantage over drones or ICBMs. It’s a joke, a Cold War fever dream.
It was a joke, but now it's a totally serious proposal because it can help with heat dissipation in orbital datacenters. Very serious. No joking here.