ChickenOverlord
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User ID: 218
ChickenOverlord
17hr ago
After 10 years, you're probably not breaking even.
Datacenter hardware lifecycles are usually 3 to 5 years so they can just give me another million and a replacement third of a rack every 3 years.
ChickenOverlord
17hr ago
Nope, at least not easily. But they can outsource their data transmission (which takes orders of magnitude less energy and computing power than actually processing it) to Earth.
I really don't think this was the gotcha you thought it was.
ChickenOverlord
18hr ago
Even just the imagery needs are enormous. Planet Labs for example processes something like 30 Terabytes of imagery a day. I don't know how they do it, but it's not hard to imagine the constraints. Even the most basic Planet Labs Dove 1 and Dove 2 CubeSats from the early 2010s didn't report every image they took back to ground antenna networks. The stress on bandwidth would be enormous.
With Starlink or a similar system I imagine it would be easy to beam a lot more of it down.
A datacenter is just a warehouse of computers. There's nothing special about it.
Yes, which is why putting them in space has very limited advantages that rarely outweigh the benefits of a terrestrial datacenter.
This is basically how Starlink already works. When you connect to Starlink it switches which satellite you're connected to every few minutes.
Starlink works by just handing off a connection/stream to a different satellite. It doesn't need to pass off 30 terabytes of image data that are already partially processed, it's a fundamentally different problem.
ChickenOverlord
20hr ago
I give a lot more credence to SpaceX, who have a decades-long history of actually delivering on serious technical challenges previously considered outlandish under conventional wisdom.
I absolutely believe SpaceX can make a space datacenter work. I'm questioning the practicality and economics of the entire idea, not whether the engineering needed for it is possible.
ChickenOverlord
21hr ago
True, I probably only get about 50. I'll take a mere $1 million to host a third of a rack instead, after all scaling these things down doesn't matter ;)
Would fit better under my basement stairs at that size anyway.
Also, I don't think your calculations for Starmind accounted for the solar panels, radiators, etc. which are far more than a normal Starlink satellite would need.
Space datacenters don't have to be cheaper than ground datacenters, they just have to be cheaper for processing space data than ground datacenters. The latency and bandwidth of space-to-grond will make space datacenters naturally attractive as space scales.
What are you smoking? Firstly, there's hardly any space data other than scientific probes by various space agencies, and communication satellites operated by both public and private entities. The latter, by their very nature, need to communicate with the ground.
Secondly, the latency difference would depend largely on where both the datacenter satellite and the source of the space data are located. In LEO, space datacenters would be less consistent in their latency than ground stations because they're orbiting the Earth roughly every 90 minutes (or you'd have to be constantly passing the data around to different space datacenters to keep latency somewhat consistent, but this data transfer would likely kill any gain you got from the latency reduction and then some).
Now of course as you start scaling up, the economics shift, but my point was that one of the advantages of orbital deployment is the ability to scale node sizes down.
If you're scaling things down to a single rack, then for $2.5 million I'll gladly stick it in my basement (which has gig fiber internet, I'll upgrade to the 2.5 gig plan if they'd prefer for that kind of money) and handle all maintenance for them.
If the point of space datacenters is being able to do them at a very small scale, there are a million better and cheaper options that don't run into the same sort of political/NIMBY resistance that big datacenters have. There's plenty of vacant office buildings with good internet and electrical hookups that would be far cheaper and easier to maintain than chucking a rack into orbit.
The economics of this literally make no sense, there's no point in doing this stuff at a small scale because you lose all the benefits of economies of scale.
Antarctica is closed to economic exploitation by international treaty. It's the complete opposite of escaping terrestrial legal jurisdiction.
Space is also covered by various international treaties, and nations on Earth would be quick to update any such treaties to cover datacenters even more strictly if companies were using such datacenters to flaunt the law of countries. And at least in their current state, these treaties basically make satellite operators subject to the laws of their host nation.
Large vessels would be preferable for stability, security, and navigational control, but power generation becomes impractical unless you permit commercial maritime nuclear reactors, which seems unlikely, or plan to have LNG refueling tankers visit every few weeks, which is expensive.
Long distance oceanic LNG shipping is about 3 to 5 cents per KG. I imagine it would be cheaper when you're just shipping out to international waters from the coast. Starship's most optimistic projections for price per kg to low Earth orbit is a little under $100 per kg, but could end up closer to $1,000 per kg.
A constellation of small solar powered vessels scales a lot less conveniently in the ocean, given communications constraints from the ground, security difficulties, and the scale of ordinary maritime maintenance that is necessary.
As opposed to the cost of sending people into space to fix the space datacenter? Most space DC proposals I've heard have actually proposed not having any human maintenance at all because of how expensive it would be, instead opting to add extra redundancy for essential components and just writing it off when a GPU or PSU fails.
and in general the floor cost per node is lower
Please, please, please show me your math for this. Even use the $100 per kg to LEO price if you want to make itas favorable to your argument as possible. I would be willing to bet you $100 donated to the charity of the winner's choice if you math shows it being cheaper than a container ship (or oil platform type structure) 370 KM off the coast (i.e. in international waters) of some LNG processing hub.
People didn't do some very basic pricing math with Solar Roadways and similar grifts. Solar Roadways would cost a metric ton more per km than just using asphalt, and a metric ton more that just sticking solar panels in a field or the desert or on a rooftop somewhere etc., while being a worse road surface and producing less power.
Space datacenters face similar economic disadvantages, and none of the proponents seem to be saying anything about the financial math here. I personally find the discussion of stuff like "How are you going to cool it?" irrelevant and a distraction, except inasmuch as they affect the cost. Cooling the datacenters is absolutely feasible, but it definitely complicates the engineering (and drastically increases the amount of material that has to be launched) far above and beyond what would be needed for a nomal terrestrial datacenter or some of the other exotic options I mentioned.
The math not mathing hasn't stopped repeated attempts at solar roadways (and solar railways, etc.). Sure, you can technically cover the road with solar panels and get some amount of power out of them, but for far less money you can get far more power by just building them in an empty field or the desert etc.
Similarly, you technically can run a datacenter in space, but it gives you effectively zero advantage over a terrestrial one (or even exotic ideas like building them out on the ocean or in Antarctica) while adding tremendous amounts of cost and complexity. I mean, I guess you get twice the amount of power per square meter of solar panels, at only an order of magnitude or two higher delivery and installation costs. And you don't really escape terrestrial legal jurisdictions any better than you would have by building the DC on a container ship out in the Pacific or something.
It's a retarded idea being pushed because it hypes normies and other retards (like venture capitalists).
ChickenOverlord
2d ago
China is the only one of those with launch capacity even remotely close to SpaceX's, and once Starship is online SpaceX will utterly dominate all competitors in terms of total launch capacity (both in weight to orbit and total number of launches).
ChickenOverlord
3d ago
All I know about Iggy Pop is that he brutally murdered the Pet Shop Boys before himself being brutally murdered by Vanilla Ice.
ChickenOverlord
3d ago
I wasn't making any kinds of arguments about the relationship between religion and morality though? I was talking about atheism not inherently leading to pure rationalism, and arguing that this explains at least in part why so many in the ratsphere seem to get caught up in new age woo. And then arguing that pure rationalism isn't even desirable anyways.
ChickenOverlord
3d ago
I'm not claiming atheists don't have chests, I'm claiming rationalists generally don't.
Thanks for pulling the quote!
We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
A rationalist might try to argue that loyalty can be derived from first principles. "It's important to express loyalty because of [insert game theory or some other retarded bullshit here]!" But loyalty and honor do not spring forth from rational considerations, they come from our feelings, our chests. Rational and material considerations can override loyalty (sometimes in ways that most would consider traitorous), but the very idea of traitorousness depends entirely on the the feelings of loyalty that they betray.
This famous meme of a frustrated Jacksonville Jaguars fan wouldn't exist in a world of pure rationalists. No one would stay a fan of such a team that pretty consistently failed to make it to the playoffs, let alone the Super Bowl:
ChickenOverlord
3d ago
Well, I must say that kebabs were delicious when I lived in Europe. But if I had to choose between a kebab and a giant bacon and egg breakfast burrito drenched in salsa, the burrito wins every time.
I did my Mormon mission in the Czech Republic. The Czechs have been in a fierce competition with the Estonians for a few decades over who can be the most atheist country in the world. Estonia appears to have a slight edge in the competition. Estimates range from approximately 1/2 to about 2/3 of either country being atheists.
Having talked to an extremely high number of (ostensibly atheist) Czechs about religion, I learned something important: being nominally atheist often doesn't mean believing in strict adherence to rationalism, the scientific method, etc. as a source of knowledge. I'd estimate that the overwhelming majority of "atheist" Czechs believed in what could loosely be called "new age gibberish" or "woo".
My point being: most people are not actually rationalists, and it's not surprising to see this, even amongst self-proclaimed rationalists. I'm not either, I think it's a retarded ideology, largely for reasons that were best covered by C. S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man when he talks about "men without chests" so I won't retread them here. But people who are strict about adherence to finding knowledge exclusively through "rational" methods are the exception, not the rule. Even amongst "rationalists".
ChickenOverlord
4d ago
Similarly, "Mexican" food in Europe is a bland and horrific abomination. The hole in the wall "I have a 2 AM hankering for a burrito the size of a small child" drive-thru Mexican place in my town in the middle of nowhere, USA absolutely mogs any European attempts. A proper sit down Mexican place would absolutely nuke European Mexican from orbit.
Also if you want to vomit, look up how Eastern Europeans do pizza. Especially Czech pizza.
ChickenOverlord
4d ago
Eh, no offense taken. I'm a mutt anyways, plenty of actual Irish, English, German, and French Canadian in my veins too.
ChickenOverlord
4d ago
And Scots. My direct patrilineal line are Scots that settled Northern Ireland as part of the plantation of Ulster, and then came from Belfast to the colonies a few decades before the revolutionary war.
ChickenOverlord
7d ago
I'm planning to add emergency water main valve shutoff as well if leaks are detected under one of the five sinks we have.
I'd highly recommend putting one in your water heater closet too
ChickenOverlord
7d ago
Assuming the husband and wife are both validly baptized and that there are no impediments to the marriage, the Church presumes Protestant marriages to be both valid and sacramental.
Would I be correct in assuming that a prior divorce would count as an impediment to the marriage in this case?
ChickenOverlord
8d ago
So basically, adult non-believers who served God to the best of their ability and who would have hypothetically desired baptism had they known of its necessity get to go to Heaven, and unbaptized children get a big question mark plus a "I really hope God has a way to save these guys."
Funnily enough that's basically the opposite of the Mormon view. We believe that babies that die are automatically saved, meanwhile we perform proxy baptisms for the dead, and those dead need to accept the baptism from the other side for it to be of any use. I.e. those who would have accepted the gospel and been baptized if they had been given the opportunity can still be saved, but it still requires an actual proxy baptism to be performed for them by the living.
ChickenOverlord
8d ago
Not sure how they can square that with the need for baptism (even of infants).
the Jesuits rub their hands sinisterly and huddle together plotting and scheming in the shadows (naturally)
A man walks up to a Franciscan and a Jesuit. "How many novenas do I have to pray to get a Ferrari?" he asks.
The Franciscan looks confused, and says "What's a Ferrari?" The Jesuit looks confused too, and says "What's a novena?"
Starlink is useful because it allows internet from anywhere in the world. It needs a certain minimum amount of computing power onboard to be able to accomplish this. A 5G cell tower, by constrast, only provides internet in a limited radius around the tower.
Building a datacenter in space offers no significant economic, legal, or technological advantages over a datacenter on the Earth.
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