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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026

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Basically, space is the last place you want to put your data center. Putting your computers basically anywhere else, be it in high altitude balloons, the summit of Mt Everest, the Mariana Trench, Point Nemo, downtown Manhattan, on harnesses worn by stray cats, the surface of the Moon, the rectal cavities of cybertruck drivers, Antarctica, Gaza (to just brainstorm a few not-so-good ideas) is going to be much less of a hassle than LEO.

I think you're greatly exaggerating. Deep ocean is a much more hostile and inaccessible location than LEO by almost any possible metric I can think of except, possibly, the energy cost of reaching it. The Moon is much further away, requires much more Δv, and isn't even sunny for half the time. Antarctica is extremely energy-poor and is unavailable for commercialization in any case.

While solar power is plentiful in space, computing turns the energy consumed into heat, and radiative cooling is not very efficient, especially if you want your chips to run at 400K and not 4000K.

At 400K, your panels should be able to reject over 1KW per m² to deep space, continuously. That's actually pretty efficient! You can do better with air cooling of course, so long as you don't care about environment heating at all, but that's also at some energy cost.

It is not that computing in space is impossible per se (every cubesat does some, after all), it is just that it is extremely painful compared to computing dirtside.

Dirtside computing can be infinitely painful, depending how uncooperative governments want to be with regulations and lawsuits. At least in LEO there's limited jurisdiction.