5 comments

  • TwelveEyes 6 minutes ago
    It still doesn’t make sense to me. Technological progress will likely only accelerate. These will be outdated within 2 years easily, and you can’t even recover the chips. The only benefits are the unlimited power without the bottlenecks on earth, lack of political pressure of course, and the low latency for processing satellite data since it doesn’t need to be sent down to earth. These don’t seem beneficial enough to waste this money. It would be good to hear from someone who knows more about this.
  • spandrew 16 minutes ago
    There were a lot of YouTube science-fluencers talking about how dumb this idea was. Google themselves called it a Moonshot (har har).

    Curious to see if the experiment changes our understanding of space radiators at a certain scale for non-space exploration purposes.

    • tpetry 9 minutes ago
      Its running for 15 minutes and then must shut down for a long time to cool down. Thats exactly why those "science-fluencers" said its a dumb idea. This is far away from proving that its a viable idea.
    • lubujackson 5 minutes ago
      Just call it SkyNet and lean into the evil.
    • sdcfgy 11 minutes ago
      I suspect it’ll go in the trash like their previous experimental infrastructure ideas did.
    • trhway 3 minutes ago
      It is 700w of heat radiating by 1m2 at 70C ( ie one GPU can sit on such a radiator) What is not to work ok here?
  • eximius 11 minutes ago
    The reasons against doing this is obvious. Is there any coherent description of why someone would think it is a good idea? And I don't mean, like, delusional reasons, but an actually rational argument for "here is where it might work out and we need to try and measure to find out".
    • sdcfgy 5 minutes ago
      It’s a completely fucking stupid idea in all ways if you throw any engineering rationale at it at all.

      Negative on: Risk, cost, thermals, radiation, maintenance, latency, complexity, environmental.

      The only win they have is making more outlandish shit to inflate value until it goes snap. One trick pony.

    • fabian2k 8 minutes ago
      I don't think it will even come close to being economically feasible. But the main arguments are that you get a lot more and constant solar power and you avoid permitting/regulations on earth.
    • MarsZebra 6 minutes ago
      Edge computing in space is needed for Golden Dome. Weapons targeting etc...

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...

      It's a multi-trillion dollar program, with Bezos/Musk involvement.

      • sdcfgy 4 minutes ago
        No one is building that. They ran out of money and kit taking Iran on already.

        At best it’ll direct a lot of public funds into musk’s and trump’s pockets.

        • MarsZebra 2 minutes ago
          Literally the entire aerospace industry these days is centered around Golden Dome.

          You should probably short UFO, SPCX, ASTS, RKLB, etc.. if you believe that.

  • esmiz 27 minutes ago
    Wall-e predictions getting closer
  • ChrisArchitect 18 hours ago