how’s an orbital datacenter going to cool itself?
Comment on I Thought I Knew You
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 3 days ago
The really hilarious thing is evaporative cooling (that takes so much water) is simple penny pinching over a closed loop system. That’s all.
…Yet Bezos and Musk are talking orbital datacenters?
Pick a lane?
nialv7@lemmy.world 3 days ago
crunchy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
Because it’s cold in space, of course /s
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 3 days ago
pebbles@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Imagine how good water could evaporate in space!
jaybone@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Water in a vacuum broke my $500 Dyson and I’m still pissed about it. I should have just got the $80 garbage from Target, and if it breaks I buy a new one. Which is so wasteful.
saigot@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
Technically it would be boiling or sublimating
ayyy@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Not really, no. It saves a shitload of electricity, which with current technology means not spewing as much CO~2~ in order to generate that electricity.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 3 days ago
See this comment: lemmy.world/post/38090104/20233592
But the TL;DR version:
-
Launching anything into space is heinously expensive.
-
With very generous math, you’d need a radiator like a mile across to cool a space data center, but practically? Probably larger.
-
Datacenter hardware is unreliable and goes obsolete quickly, and any kind of maintenance in space is basically cost prohibitive.
-
There are other smaller yet still crippling engineering challenges, like bit flips from radiation (which gets move severe as lithography shrinks; look up Nvidia’s research on this), assembling large structures in space reliably, and extremely difficult/expensive networking.
And most of all… Solar is dirt cheap on Earth, compared to that.
It’s like saying “air conditioning is difficult” and proposing “I know! Let’s live under the Antarctic ice sheet!” That’s not hyperbole. It might be more practical, actually…
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I hate that the anti AI stuff is 90% idiotic planning permission and capitalism, 5% “The idiots making this put no effort into it” and 5% “I just don’t like it, yuck”.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Not sure I understand you but I think I get it?
Like, most of what AI bad is the cultism and corporate shit. Like literally shaving 2% off costs to drain a town’s water or something, or proselytizing scaling up transformers and while ignoring the efficiency/scaling papers that keep coming out (because that would break the grift).
…At the same time, the absolute energy cost is ridiculously overstated compared to, say, global aluminum or steel production.
And then you have the ridiculous politicization. An example I often cite is a TV series that was ‘fan remastered’ and (as one component in a long chain) upscaled with an oldschool GAN that cost peanuts to train. Beloved years ago, but all of a sudden the fandom hates it because it has something to do with ‘AI’.
-
MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
See, they could meet power demands in space, solar panels are much more efficient in space vs on the surface of the Earth. I don’t know that even modern panels are efficient enough to supply what is needed, but the numbers are going to be better than what we would need on earth.
But datacenters? In space? The whole idea is half baked at best. Data center equipment isn’t light; and heavy stuff doesn’t like to go up into orbit. Then you need to consider how much thrust you’re going to need to keep that stuff in orbit… The numbers just don’t work in my mind…
If we had a thruster system that didn’t require burning a skyscraper worth of fuel to get into orbit, then maybe? But we don’t, so …
I could maybe see it happening on the moon, because then you wouldn’t need to worry as much about your orbit, but then you have at least three big problems to solve, how the heck are you getting the equipment there, how are you powering it, and simple latency.
Getting it there will burn so much fuel that I’m not sure it’s a valuable thing to do at all. For power, yes, solar will be pretty good on the moon, just like in orbit, but the moon rotates. One of the faces of the moon is always towards the earth, so when it’s between the earth and sun, that face is in darkness, and if you build on the other side, it will be in darkness when it’s on the far side, away from the sun. You would effectively need an array of solar that runs a loop around the whole surface so at least something is in the sun pretty much all the time, especially considering the moon rotates every 29ish days. I don’t know of any power storage system that’s robust enough to store the power requirements of a datacenter for half a month while the moon slowly orbits back into the sunlight.
The last thing is latency. Light is the fastest “moving” thing in the known universe. We have yet to observe anything that can propagate faster than light. Some things can match the speed, but nothing goes faster. The Moon is approximately 1.3 light-seconds away. Regardless of all other factors, it will take no less than 2.6 seconds, round trip. I don’t know of many applications for data center tech that is ok with that kind of delay. Super computers, maybe, but datacenters, not so much.
The whole thing is wrought with issues from the ground up. And I’m not even a scientist, and I can see the obvious problems here.
Meanwhile, we have 2/3rds of the planet covered in water, which is basically unused space by humans. It’s vast and plentiful, and as a bonus, has built in cooling. Microsoft was testing datacenter stuff at sea and AFAIK, it went pretty well. I believe they’ve discontinued it since it’s still not as practical as land-based datacenters, but the idea is solid at least. Space based stuff is even less practical. I don’t see why anyone would want to take on the cost of something like this when there are cheaper and more profitable alternatives.
Sadbutdru@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
You make some good points, and there’s also thermal issues.
The whole reason the datacentres use so much water is cooling all those processors.
Rejecting heat in space is super hard because you’re ultimately relying only on radiation (not enough matter for conduction/convection), no matter how many heavy/expensive/complex/maintenance-needing cooling systems you use.
MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Oh. Yeah. That’s not ideal, but IMO, no less ideal than ejecting the heat into the atmosphere as steam or something… But we do that all the time. Pretty much all power generation relies on making water hot and using the steam to make things spin…
thespcicifcocean@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Also don’t forget, space has a lot of radiation. Bits are gonna get flipped.
MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Oh yes. There’s a ton of other considerations for sure, I’m mentioning these because I feel like they’re pretty significant hurdles to the entire idea being practical.
thespcicifcocean@lemmy.world 1 day ago
deep ocean would be better for this, you can shed heat easier and also, we can turn it into a reef when the world finally realizes that AI is stupid and a waste of resources.
WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today 2 days ago
Orbital space station + pulley system? Sounds nuts, but…
thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 2 days ago
All else aside, the biggest problem with putting a data center in space is cooling it. Getting rid of megawatts of energy at around 100 C when you have only radiative cooling to work with is an absolute bitch. For that reason alone, the “data center in space” idea is complete crap.
WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today 1 day ago
Unless it’s really energy efficient: a.k.a crap at compute
BennyInc@feddit.org 3 days ago
All that evaporating water is gonna trickle down eventually. Just like the money.
aeronmelon@lemmy.world 3 days ago
What’s going to be in the water when it gets down there?
BennyInc@feddit.org 2 days ago
How many golden showers does Trump own?
Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
I don’t know if I can take them trickling on me much more than they already are.