IMO evaporative cooling should be illegal at a certain scale. Water is valuable.
I Thought I Knew You
Submitted 3 days ago by MTZ@lemmy.world to [deleted]
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c74f8fbc-24be-40d1-a5e6-c091c8fc00a6.jpeg
Comments
ZkhqrD5o@lemmy.world 2 days ago
theolodis@feddit.org 2 days ago
They should be forced to use salt water for their AI data center cooling, and use the evaporated water to get fresh water.
Petter1@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
I fear the environmental impact of replacing tubes and fixing leaks etc would be greater than the what we win on fresh water.
Don’t understand me wrong, the idea is pretty good, but salt water is no joke to manage, especially when you vepe it, I mean the salt goes anywhere.
dan1101@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Water is essential and we keep fucking with it. Sewage, mining/fracking debris, data centers, runoff, garbage.
MiddleAgesModem@lemmy.world 2 days ago
The other day I saw a post with a picture of a baby elephant. The source was provided, a published imagine in a magazine long predating what we’re calling AI. Without a doubt a real photo.
Still, the comments were chock full of people absolutely certain it was AI generated. People even added in red arrows and circles pointing out their “proof”. The possibility of AI-generated content has created some kind of collective psychosis.
PugJesus@piefed.social 3 days ago
Sorry 😭
BallShapedMan@lemmy.world 3 days ago
You may just have the perfect Lemmy name! That is all.
PugJesus@piefed.social 3 days ago
May many respiratorially-challenged small dogs bless you, my child ✋
lugal@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
Also Coca Cola has a factory in Atarot, Occupied Palestine
Boycott Israel means boycott Coca Cola
MTZ@lemmy.world 3 days ago
My girlfriend’s is Palestinian. She was born and raised there, and lived there until about ten years ago when she came to the USA. I totally get what you are saying, but even she has a Coke every once in awhile.
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
Easy, I didn’t want to buy coca cola products anyway
aarch0x40@lemmy.world 3 days ago
How dare you! Think of the Investor’s Money! Mega yachts don’t buy themselves!
lengau@midwest.social 16 hours ago
Thanks for reminding me. I need to go and take a nice long bath.
theuniqueone@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
Why are making yourself “clean” when that water could be used to generate profit making?
jaybone@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Cat: can’t you just lick yourself, stupid human?
einlander@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Any reason the background is Mr. Rogers house?
peteypete420@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Not the creator, but Im assuming its the same reason for kitty kat, comfortable imagery lures us in for the text to smack us with some uncomfortable (honestly scary) realities.
Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Better we waste it than the corporate slugs
einlander@lemmy.world 3 days ago
But remember only you can save the environment by saving water!
jaybone@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Used to be agriculture was using 98% of the water, but we were supposed to take short showers and not flush our toilets. I guess now it’s data centers.
RickyRigatoni@retrolemmy.com 2 days ago
Do these cooling systems need fresh water or does salt water work?
mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
salt water cooling systems are more expensive
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?
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?
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.
nialv7@lemmy.world 3 days ago
how’s an orbital datacenter going to cool itself?
crunchy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
Because it’s cold in space, of course /s
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 3 days ago
that’s the joke
pebbles@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Imagine how good water could evaporate in space!
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…
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.
thespcicifcocean@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Also don’t forget, space has a lot of radiation. Bits are gonna get flipped.
WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today 2 days ago
Orbital space station + pulley system? Sounds nuts, but…