Have you never seen a movie set in space? Evrytime someone gets sucked into space they freeze. You saying every movie got it wrong?? Space is cold. Duh.
Comment on Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea.
lordnikon@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
My question is always how the hell are you going to cool them. Do you know hard it is to move heat in a vacuum?
Jack_Burton@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
credo@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Easy, just create a long heat sink and dangle it in the earth’s atmosphere. Now we are winning!
0x0@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
From that to a space elevator…
Fermion@mander.xyz 3 weeks ago
With radiators just like with every existing satellite system.
Very large scale datacenters would likely have some nasty fluid handling problems to solve.
Devial@discuss.online 3 weeks ago
Have you seen the size of the radiators on the ISS ? And that’s just what needed for cooling of body heat for 9 people and basic computer and support equipment.
A data center that is actively pumping out massive amounts of heat would need humongous radiator panels.
XLE@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
And you can only build so many of those radiator panels before you start running into congestion problems. You don’t want them radiating onto each other.
Devial@discuss.online 3 weeks ago
And those radiator panels are heavy and big, therefore enormously expensive to launch, and vulnerable to micro meteorites and other orbital debris.
Fermion@mander.xyz 3 weeks ago
The area of radiator needed directly corresponds to the amount of power harvested by the solar panels. It doesn’t matter what the load is. So a compute frame with the same amount of solar panels as the space station would need approximately the same radiatot area as the ISS, unless you are bringing nuclear power into the mix.
I agree that space based datacenters are a bad idea, but the thermals really are not the gotcha people are making them out to be.
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The solar panels needed is another problem for the space data center fantasy. Once you put together all the mass over enough surface area to make it work, you would blot out the sun worldwide.
fallaciousBasis@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
They’re called fins. Not panels.
Devial@discuss.online 3 weeks ago
What, thought your comment was so amazing you had to repost it after the first for removed for you being a dick ?
Go touch grass, dude.
lordnikon@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yeah the amount of heat a data center vs a satellite your going to super heat the space in that orbit over time. It they are geostationary then its even harder as the the data center doesn’t move away from the heat.
erin@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
Geostationary satellites are not standing still. They’re orbiting the Earth at the same rate that it rotates “beneath” them.
nabladabla@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
Um, it doesn’t make the data center in orbit thing make sense, but a geostationary satellite absolute moves at high speed and does not stay in the same place in space.
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The heat would be moving at the same speed. Though, that does mean it wouldn’t be any better in any other orbit.
Fermion@mander.xyz 3 weeks ago
Radiators in space work by radiating electromagnetic energy(light). Heat can only accumulate in matter, not in space, so that is definitely not one of the things we need to worry about.
wewbull@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
Super heat what in that space? The point is there’s nothing to transfer heat to. All you can do is radiate infra-red light.
teft@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
geostationary then its even harder as the the data center doesn’t move away from the heat.
Geostationary would leave the satellite in shadow anytime it was night time over the part of the earth since a geostationary orbit is stationary in the sky over a given point at the equator.
That doesn’t solve any of the cooling problems just saying that you do get some shadow at geostationary orbits.
There are other orbits that get less shadow though.
wewbull@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
fallaciousBasis@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
A radiator. Next question?
BeardededSquidward@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
What’s going to be performing convection to dissipate heat from the radiator in a manner to support the heat generated by an AI data center?
Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Obnoxious as he seems to be, he’s actually right, there will be no convection, but they’d radiate heat in a vacuum, by IR IIRC.
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
You’d need an enormous radiator to move the heat a data center puts out. Not even all the billionaires put together could afford that.
BeardededSquidward@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
To do that they’d have to be filled with something other than something water based to be able to do that over a large area which would require constant maintenance to do so. It’s not easily feasible and I doubt people who want to do this or defend it realize that. I have to look it up but it takes Anhydrous Ammonia to perform that in the ISS. Like this is a bad idea and it fries my brain people trying to defend this.
fallaciousBasis@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
What part of radiator don’t you understand?
athatet@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
What you don’t understand is the size requirements those radiators would need to have to cool an entire data center.
BeardededSquidward@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
Tell me you don’t know how radiators actually work without telling me. They dissipate heat via convection through the air surrounding them or gasses in general. What does space lack a significant amount of?
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Raditors. Starlink v3 can in theory already shed 20Kw of heat. But they would need to figure out how to 5x that and keep things profitable.
wewbull@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
It would be 20kW for each rack or two. The types of data centre deal they talk about these days are measured in GW of compute. That’s 50,000x just for 1GW.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
These aren’t big things, they’re small satellites. They’re going to be ~100kW
fallaciousBasis@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
How would you power them?
The surface area of solar panels exceeds the surface area needed for radiators to cool everything.
In space I would imagine you’d find the perfect sandwich ratio. One bun solar, one bun radiators, the meat being the racks.
EndOfLine@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The problems; plural; is that the person who popularized the idea of data centers in space has little to zero understanding of any of the space sciences and yet owns and directs one of the world’s largest, and privately owned, aerospace companies with massive government contracts that splits its time with their own AI work.
fallaciousBasis@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
We already have data centers in space.
athatet@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Oh? Good. Problem solved then.
Akasazh@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
User name checks out, though