Comment on Elon Musk Is Rolling xAI Into SpaceX—Creating the World’s Most Valuable Private Company
WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 5 days ago
A million satellites he says. That’s 100 satellites per starship launch. 5 times per day, every day, for five years. By the time you’re done, the first ones are burned out and you have to do it all again. And that’s assuming one GPU per satellite because solar panels even in space can’t pull enough power to feed multiple of those hungry things.
Iseja@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Energy is the least of their concerns, getting rid of the heat is a much bigger problem.
WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 5 days ago
Radiators in space are a proven tech. In practice that just means more expensive to build and launch.
Iseja@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Yeah it is a proven tech but requires quite a lot of space/weight and usually when satellites get the most energy from solar panels they also “generate” the most heat.
MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
But space is cold
realitista@lemmus.org 5 days ago
It’s a vacuum. Which means that there aren’t atoms to get hot or cold. Which means there is no medium with which to exchange heat to cool something down, unless you are willing to bring a bunch of your own air to blow over the servers and then vent into space. Which means bringing an awful lot of air with you.
A server sitting in the vacuum of space would quickly over heat for lack of ventilation (if it didn’t get smashed because it wasn’t engineered to run in a vacuum).
MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
I wasn’t being serious by the way, but thanks for the detailed explanation of why, always appreciated to know the actual ins and outs no matter the topic.
mcv@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
Space feels cold if you have some fluid to evaporate, like blood or something. But servers will very quickly run out of whatever fluids they have if they tried this. (And so would you in their place.)
The only option to sustainably lose heat in space is radiation, which works, but is slow and limited in capacity, so these server satellites would need massive radiators. It’s not impossible to do. ISS also has massive radiators.
So servers in space is possible. How big you can make an orbital server park, I don’t know. I can imagine that with enough radiators, they start catching each other’s heat, so there might be a limit to have many radiators you can put closely together, but I have no idea what that limit might be.