| Even with this benefit of the doubt, even stretching our suspense of disbelief as far as it can go, we are basically talking about a niche military application that inherently has a limited market value. In other words, we can just assume this concept is possible and makes sense some level of financial sense for military, government, and high sensitivity use cases. Well, find me a military contractor worth $1.5 trillion. Lockheed Martin is worth 1/10th of that. Put Lockheed Martin and AT&T together and you’ve got about 1/5 of a SpaceX IPO target valuation. Even if we make this assumption that the technology is marketable and has merit, it’s not like every company or government agency is going to want to switch to this technology. There are already a number of alternatives that can mitigate many to all of the risks that it solves. The cost and complexity right now to deploy global services and their disaster recovery replicas to multiple distant data centers in the terrestrial world is already extremely low. Often, these features are offered as an off-the-shelf service. California could sink into the ocean and my users wouldn’t even see a blip of downtime. Unless they live in California. Heck, build some data centers underground in deep fortified bunkers if you want. That would be cheaper than launching them into space. They might even be easier to defend than satellites and space DCs because a foreign adversary can’t just launch a missile up in the sky to get to it. Going back to not really suspending disbelief as much, I also think performance and latency is going to be an insurmountable problem. Right now as we speak Starlink residential service is about 10x slower than my home fiber connection at the same price. How is this technology going to compete with data center level infrastructure even in an optimistic scenario? I can toss pennies per hour at Amazon for a relatively small VM with like 4GB of RAM and they’ll give that thing a 15 gigabit connection. |
Where I live in New Zealand the only good internet provider is Starlink, so all my internet is through Starlink. The latency is about 20ms, so while yes you are technically correct that is 10x slower then 2ms, it isn't a major deal breaker.
You are probably thinking about light and fast API calls, where latency is more noticeable. But if you are doing an inference or LLM job that is going to take several seconds of token generation before the full response is available then the difference between 3.002s and 3.020s is negligible.
> build some data centers underground in deep fortified bunkers if you want.
This is the defensive build. The US has a tendency to optimize for offense.
Let's roll forward another few decades, and imagine a classic dystopia scenario: pervasive worldwide surveillance systems, armed drones and robots everywhere, etc. Where does the data from those surveillance systems get crunched, and where do the drones and robots get controlled from? Probably not from one central system in one place. That would ironically be too high latency. These systems would most likely end up as generic shells with minimal on board smarts, controlled by AI "brains" up in LEO, 20ms away via radio. The AI observes from overhead via it's surveillance systems, and it acts via it's robot bodies down on Earth.
It sounds like sci-fi, but you have to remember the world is full of megalomaniac nerds. They love this type of stuff, and if they think someone might be able to build it, then they want to be the one to build it.