Bezos plan for solar powered datacenters is out of this world… literally

Comments

• frongt@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  This is stupid as hell. Fortunately the article covers the reasons why. Points to Tobias for proper journalism instead of just breathlessly repeating their slop.

  source

  • markz@suppo.fi ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I expected reurgitated marketing points, but then saw which site this is.

    This idea is just so dumb.

    source
  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    But they didn’t tell bozo, apparently.

    On the other hand, using heat pumps, couldn’t heat panels be pumped to 1000+ °C, where infrared cooling is more effective?

    source

    • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Sure, but engineering materials still start to break down at such high continuous service temps. And mechanical heat pumps become very impractical above 250C as things like compressors and phase change refrigerants also break down under extreme temperatures.

      source
    • IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      But they didn’t tell bozo, apparently.

      Since when do billionaires listen to anybody other than the sycophants they surround themselves with?

      source
• brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Billionaire seem to have a… unscientific view of a sci fi future. Especially Musk, since he thinks he’s so transcendental, but apparently Bezos can’t help himself now either.

  It doesn’t look like Star Trek.

  It doesn’t look like a Cyberpunk movie.

  I’d recommend diving into this for a more scientifically ‘thought out’ extrapolation: www.orionsarm.com

  ---

  Interestingly, this is a neat idea waaay down the line. But not anytime in the near future, not until humanity is very, very different (assuming we survive that long).

  source

  • very_well_lost@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I’d recommend diving into this for a more scientifically ‘thought out’ and optimistic extrapolation: www.orionsarm.com

    Man… if the Technopocolpyse is what you consider optimistic, I’d hate to find out what you consider pessimism!

    source

    • Cybersteel@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      AI will turn all of us into paperclips before long unless the AI jihad succeeds.

      source
    • brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Humanity survived though. Even ‘humans’ dying out but some form of life expanding out would be not terrible.

      My biggest fear is Earth ‘fizzling’ and never expanding, and the odds of that happening are pretty high.

      source

      • -> View More Comments
  • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Billionaire seem to have a… unscientific view of a sci fi future.

    That’s cause due to network effects people who are making such projects are equivalent to grocers in qualification. Just were in the right place at the right time. They are not engineers, not philosophers. But since they’ve read and seen in sci-fi that they have to show something engineer-philosopher-like, they are doing all this bullshit.

    Our world’s problem is in these monopolies which should be busted. After they are busted, we’ll see a lot of goodness through the usual normal competition.

    And also I don’t think the sequence of events that led to the current state of things should be treated as some proof of “capitalism not working” or “computer-driven futurism being a dead end” or even “space travel not ever happening” or anything as radical. Every time is different. It’s like living all your life alone after one bad relationship.

    We should dream, and we should make, and we should try, and we should tell those who think it’s their “vision” or none to go kick rocks.

    source
  • Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It doesn’t look like a Cyberpunk movie.

    The real world looks surprisingly like a cyberpunk movie already.

    source
  • simulacra_procession@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Dyson Spheres Are a Joke

    source

    • brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      With the caveat that I only read the transcripts, I don’t find that compelling at all.

      The initial sentiment is correct; folks like Sam Altman responding to existential problems like “oh we can just build a Dyson Sphere in 30 years” should be in freaking jail instead of power.

      But the only other justification I see is “well, this is stupidly impractical in the context of current humans.” Things like:

      • “What, we make all those nanobots and get all that energy with fusion and use it to disassemble Jupiter?”

      • “Why don’t we just use that energy to leave the solar system?”

      • “Say it’s a Dyson Swarm; what do we do living on all those solar satellites?”

      She’s fallen into the same trap of “existing sci fi” she accuses other of falling into.

      We’re not talking about a bunch of people in space looking to expand a habit. At this point, we’re talking about some AI that’s already converted an entire moons worth of mass into computronium, can upload folks to VR and simulate realities, that can reconfigure atomic nuclei into ultradense strings of matter or construct and control tiny black holes to generate energy and elements.

      It’s left the solar system loooong ago.

      Its capabilities, needs, and goals are completely umhuman, and at that point pondering how to efficiently capture the output of all this stellar mass sustainably is absolutely practical to plan. A Dyson Sphere (or more practically a swarm) isn’t the only way, but it’s not the worst idea for a “young” intelligence. And in OA, at a certain point, the Sephrotics seem to construct dyson spheres as habitats for aesthetic reasons, whereas their actual industrial/computational bases are different arrangements of masses.

      source

      • -> View More Comments
• Delta_V@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  mfw Bezos wants to build Mikoshi

  Image

  source

  • melroy@kbin.melroy.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Spot on. Bezos stole the ideal from cyberpunk

    source
• OctopusNemeses@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Is there some evil villain angle to this. Like the data is hosted outside of any country thus not subject to any laws or regulations.

  source

  • HiTekRedNek@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    That sounds like privacy, not evil.

    Because history, as well as current events, tell us that governments will absolutely make privacy illegal, so if you can do an end run of them by not being beholden to ANY government, then that is absolutely a good thing.

    source

    • Buffalox@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      That sounds like privacy

      Oh boy you are naive if you think that’s the result of no regulation.
      The real result will be monetization, selling the info to everyone who wants to buy including governments.

      source

      • -> View More Comments
• Badabinski@kbin.earth ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  We've had the template for this for decades. Put the solar panels in space where the thick soupy gunky spunky atmosphere doesn't stop the little energy things from the sun. Collect the power in orbit. You just do that up there up in orbit okay? And then you fucking beam the power down to the surface you numpty fucks. Use a maser to send the power down to the surface and you can pick a frequency that isn't affected by the gunky spunky and then the receivers on the ground can pick it up and they send the power through these things called wires to a building that uses the power and the building can use this neat little thing called CONVECTION to more efficiently remove the heat from the things using the electricity wow.

  Or just, y'know, use less power and make use of ground based solar. We don't need fucking AI data centers in space. Don't get me wrong, I think it might be useful to, say, have some compute up in geostationary orbit that other satellites could punt some data to for computation. You could have an evenly spaced ring of the fuckers so the users up there can get some data crunching done with a RTT of like 50ms instead of 700ms. That seems like a hard sell, but it at least seems a bit tenable if you needed to reduce the data you're sending back to the earth down to a more manageable amount. That is still not fuckass gigawatt AI data centers. Fuck

  source

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    That’s a more interesting idea but still quite questionable, given how expensive sending anything to space is, and then maintaining it.

    It made more sense with solar was expensive per square mm, but that is no longer the case.

    Also, transmission is a huge problem. It’s easy to say ‘make a maser,’ but making giant one and aiming it reliably and making (without frying nearby terrain as the satellite moves to track the sun), and making a receiver big enough from how much the laser spreads out from geosync orbit is a tall order.

    source

    • frongt@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      And efficiency, too. Even at a really good 50%, both for the solar panels and the maser, that’s still a fuckton of heat being generated.

      source

      • -> View More Comments
    • Badabinski@kbin.earth ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Yeah, I think it'd be a pretty silly thing for us to ever try to do. My goal was to take their stupid idea, provide a slightly less stupid idea, and then say "or just don't do space power at all and keep everything terrestrial." Orbital solar power stations were lots of fun in science fiction, but panels are cheap, there's plenty of land, and giant death masers that cook any birds flying into the beam are, uh, suboptimal.

      source
    • crank0271@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Proportionally though, there is far more space in space.

      source
• myfunnyaccountname@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  And soak up all the sun and leave us in the dark?

  source

  • portuga@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    No we can just pave the dark side of the moon with solar panels, and beam it back to earth

    source
  • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It would, eh, take some time to soak up all the sun with whatever they can put there.

    source
• prototact@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Typical tech-bro bait for cultivating the cult of worship that allows billionaires to extract profit from compliant drones and consumers. Just because he is rich we have to listen to every bs statement his says cause it can have consequences one way or the other. People should stop buying from Amazon yesterday. It’s really that simple.

  source
• technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  When total morons win the capitalist lottery…

  source

  • demonsword@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It’s not a lottery. Very few rich people weren’t born already rich. Bezos himself came from a wealthy family.

    source
• HertzDentalBar@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Only good capitalist is a dead capitalist.

  source
• source_of_truth@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Governments scramble to take lobby money as parasitic tech con man claims “Fart powered AI is the next big thing”.

  source
• BigBrownBeaver@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Please don’t forget to put some strong lasers together with AI on that orbit too

  source
• db2@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Send him there. Not in a suit or a ship, just him.

  source
• sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I think it’s more likely we’ll put solar reflectors in space that enhance power absorption on earth. But there’s no way solving heat dissipation in space is more efficient than getting energy from space to earth. Maybe it would work on the moon where we could dissipate heat into rock, but not in space.

  source
• airportline@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I like the idea but I don’t think that will counteract the gross environmental damage that his data centers cause.

  source