• TwistedTurtle@sh.itjust.works
    4·
    4 days ago

    Air & water is what carries most of the heat away. Putting server farms that need to stay cool in space makes 0 sense. Space isn’t necessarily “cold” like people think.

    • CovfefeKills@lemmy.world
      14·
      4 days ago

      Air & water are not the only things that can cool a computer down in space. We want faster more powerful computers in space to process telescope data before streaming it back to earth because the limits are bandwidth and computing we can already send big camera sensors up there. The AI hate fad is catching strays. Some of our more amazing data is from longform surveys taken from the ground where the data is stored in, you guessed it, a datacenter.

      • smiletolerantly@awful.systems
        5·
        3 days ago

        Stop moving the goal post. To process satellite images, you need way, waaaaay, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay less compute than for AI datacenters. We are not arguing about image processing for a single satellite. (Which is still jot a great idea, ideally you’d want to improve throughput instead since you still want the raw images for people to work with, just faster, no?)

        No, what you were talking about were data enters for AI (no, you didn’t say AI, but that’s what everyone on Lemmy says is a bad idea in space, and you were referring to everyone on Lemmy, so, we are talking about AI data enters in space).

        • putting them in space doesn’t make them faster.
        • putting them in space is incredibly expensive
        • cooling them in space is way harder than on earth; radiating heat away is a function of the surface area of the cooling modules, and you cannot escape that
        • maintenance (remember - things fail) is way harder and astronomically expensive and slow
        • and, thanks for reminding me, sending AI output to and from is subject to the same slowness as for images from telescopes

        Sorry, “data-center in space” is a stupid idea. Musk yaps about it because a) he’s an idiot and b) enough investors fell for it

        • CovfefeKills@lemmy.world
          14·
          3 days ago

          If I am moving the goalposts it is because I am moving them back. Nice try you anti-science asshole.

          This is what I said 15 hours ago it is unedited…

          The AI hate train is trying to hold back high performance computing from processing sensor data and streaming it back to earth.

          You are just pathetic. You don’t get to tell me what I am talking about so you can feel better about yourself you rot.

        • CovfefeKills@lemmy.world
          12·
          3 days ago

          One way is just by making something hot. It will radiate heat energy into space without convection. But I am not here trying to design a space computer I am here to piss on internet tribalism.