• Rakonat@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    6 hours ago

    Good luck dumbfuck, tell me how easy it is to service, maintain and repair them when you inevitably overheat them, or don’t have the proper shielding so components burn out or degrade beyond useful parameters.

    Mars is all red, maybe you want to restart those plans and take your flock of sheeple with you as soon as possible?

    • Joe@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      18
      ·
      5 hours ago

      As much as I dislike Musk, he probably could tell you in detail. His company is not the only one looking into compute in space, either.

      • VeloRama@feddit.org
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        3 hours ago

        there’s no convection cooling in space, because vacuum is a very good thermal insulator. compute in space does not scale because of that alone. you would need massive (F/M)IR radiator arrays to get rid of the thermal energy.

      • dustyData@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        edit-2
        3 hours ago

        Nah, it’s a grift. The Melon’s pitch straight up includes factually wrong physics claims. It is not easier, nor cheaper, to have data centers in space.

        Actual scientists have done the math. Even disregarding maintenance for data corruption from radiation, and assuming the best near future tech. It would take 10 times an ISS equivalent structure to power and cool down a single server rack.

        Musk promised he wants to get 1 Tera Watt of LLM processing power in orbit. That’s 10,000 times an ISS of solar panels and IR radiators for cooling. The enterprise is completely unrealistic.

        The whole thing is just a con to get governments to funnel more money into his companies without having to deliver any actual results.