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The current buildout is about to run into the wall that is the electrical grid. AI will become unpopular overnight as soon as people realize that the brand new data center down the road is causing their electric bill to go up.
Posts like this make me think that the only bubble we are actually in is an AI-won't-matter copium bubble.
Have you ever seen a popular end-user technology become unpopular because of some pesky externalities? I can only think of several that produced a stinking trash heap of them and took zero popularity damage for it, like, for example, cars.
I wouldn't say cars took zero popularity damage - anti-car urbanism is a powerful political force even if it isn't close a majority. In so far as nimbyism is about traffic and parking it is an anti-car movement, just a hypocritical one for people who don't object to their own cars. My impression is that between anti-car urbanists and traffic-and-parking nimbys, about 60% of Americans and 80% of Europeans want other people's cars out of their neighbourhood and are willing to vote on the issue. Cars survive despite being the notorious externalities because they are so useful. (More so in poorly-policed places than well-policed ones, which explains why cars are more popular in America than Europe and more popular in Europe than 1st-world Asia)
There are a few technologies that became unpopular due to negative externalities as soon as an almost-as-good end-user alternative became available. Leaded petrol is the most obvious example - unleaded had a noticeably lower octane rating at the same price and yet the ban on leaded petrol stuck politically.
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How likely is that really though? Very often, it's the capital investments that are the primary cost drivers of utility prices, and the larger customers usually pay a larger share of the capital investments that are needed to support their usage, which would normally lead to lower marginal prices for everyone else. I've seen this play out multiple times in municipalities when it comes to water: large industrial customers support large municipal capital investments, which through economy of scale drive down the unit cost of water to residential customers. The large customers go away, the capacity now far exceeds the demand, and the per-unit cost of water goes way up to pay for the infrastructure despite the huge reduction of demand.
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We are going to win a trade war with China! We are going to bring the factories home!
A few companies add a few GW of base load demand and people start freaking out. The failure to build electricity has got to be one of the largest self owns ever.
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But not if we launch them into orbit ! (I can no longer tell if this is crazy bubble talk or the next logical step after starlink)
Absolutely retarded because you can't cool anything in space.
That's only a problem for the hot fleshy meatbags on the ISS. For a computer, adding some long radiators works great in space. And China is already doing this
You have no idea how basic physics works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope
If you can't cool anything in space due to basic physics then why does this claim that the Telescope among other things is cooled by radiating heat?
Charitably, what @venqq wanted to say was not that radiative cooling is impossible, only that it is very expensive. The JWST has a budget of just shy of 10G$. It's solar panels can deliver 2kW.
Obviously, this is a bit unfair. Nobody is suggesting that we should park computational satellites at L2, the single point near Earth where they get the least sun. And most of the money was probably not spent on either the solar panels or radiating heat enough to keep digital electronics comfortable.
As another data point, consider a cubesat. These are common cheap satellites launched in bulk into low orbits. Launch costs for 1U (10x10x10cm^3) are only 100k$.
Per WP, the electrical power available on a cube is about 10W. From that, it seems feasible to run a Raspberry Pi 4 (which draws about 6W under load).
Sure, the initial investment is higher, but once we are in orbit, we do not have to pay for power, nor rent for the space occupied by our solar panels. Let us calculate how long we need to break even.
At a generous 10W, the Pi will require 88kWh/year of electricity. Assuming 0.2$ per kWh, that amounts to some 17.5$ per year. So our orbital Pi would need to run for some 5700 years to be cost effective.
Obviously it will not. In a decade, it will be technologically obsolete (with no way to upgrade it), and radiation damage and atmospheric drag will do the rest. Drawing any power at in the half of the orbit where you are in Earth's shadow will put a lot of wear on your batteries over the years.
Now obviously, you can do better. If you build a billion dollar satellite constellation for computation, I can imagine you will get 10 times as much usable power for your buck. But the problem is that you would have to be better by a factor of 2000 (so your ROI is around 2-3 years) before orbital computation would be economic.
My TL;DR is that in space, things that are utterly trivial on Earth are hard and expensive. You go to space if there are specific benefits for your application (such as with the JWST or TV transmitters) which are worth the pain. If there are no good reasons to put something in orbit, it is generally much more economic to do stuff dirtside.
Thanks for actually taking the time to actually think about the idea and run numbers for it, unlike @venqq who seemed to have wildly misunderstood it and then personally insulted me for no reason.
II will point out though, the numbers your using are based on the simplest type of cubesat, which is pretty much the worst possible case for solar power or radiation. small and compact, designed to fit into the unused capacity of larger launches, and usually not intended to last very long.
On more professional satellites, solar panels are long, thin, wide ones like what you see on the ISS, which makes over 100 KW of power. And all of that, plus the crew's body heat, gets radiated away. It's hype, it's not buzzwords, it's very real. It's 1970s science that I thought everyone was aware of by now.
Most things are hard in space, but solar panels really aren't. There's a reason those have been standard on all satellites since the very early days, even back in the 1960s when solar panels were far less efficient. They get something like 10x the solar intensity you'd get on the surface of the earth, and available almost all the time (only like 20% in Earth's shadow, and can be zero if you launch in a polar orbit)
Obviously the big stumbling block is the launch cost. These ideas all depend on having SpaceX, or something similar from China, massively bring down the cost from the current $50000/kg to something more like $500 or less. But yes, obviously there's the big "if" Starship or something similar really works.
But if it does... starting from you restimate of 5700 years... 100x decrease in launch cost, and 10x increase in power from simple optimizations to the design, it pays for itself in 5.7 years. Not bad.
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That's precisely the point. You can only radiate heat which isn't particularly effective compared conduction and convection. This telescope has to be in space for other reasons - it's not in space in order to be cold. Sending compute into space in order to cool it is ludicrous. The guy above seems ignorant of basic concepts and falls for marketing buzzwards which the company's own prospectus disagrees with (they are trying to enable computing in space, not going to space in order to compute. In other words, space is not a welcoming environment for this.)
Edit: Circling back, I believe my interpretation was correct and this other guy doesn't understand basic physics nor that things carry costs. Indeed, resorting to space because you don't trust the grid is hilarious considering how much private grid you could build on Earth instead.
Where did the guy above say that they're sending compute in space to cool it? My impression was that he said they're sending compute in space so it can be independent of Earth's electrical grid. Whether it can be sufficiently cooled by radiation or not is, I think, sufficiently beyond "basic" physics that your borderline-bait response was unwarranted.
"You moron, you absolute retard, the Earth isn't round.It's a geoid ."
My thoughts on hearing all this talk about putting compute nodes in space is that they're more likely to be sufficiently cooked by radiation -- the cosmic ray sort, that is. I'm not an expert on this sort of thing, but I'd guess that a top-line NVIDIA GPU with its as-small-as-modern-technology-can-create transistors is about as far as one can get on the silicon-design spectrum from the concept of "radiation-hard design".
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Despite the data center build out in Virginia, electricity prices there increased at half the national average, as this hilariously written axios piece reports.
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