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Okay we all hate Musk, but calling the cooling of a datacenter in space “easy” is correct if you read “easy” as “something we already know how to do,” which is kind of how he talks. Pretending to dismiss the idea simply because space is a vacuum ignores realities like the ISS.
Anyway, if you want an explanation of cooling a space datacenter, this video by physicist/astronomer Scott Manly explains it in exhaustive technical detail. There’s some pretty good layman’s language at around the 15-minute point.
TL;DR: Yes, you could cool a large datacenter in space by doing various things we already know how to do.
The only skills Elon has is exploiting workers and milking the government for money. By all accounts he’s terrible at everything else
This guy really thought Elon Musk was one of the engineers designing Tesla cars?
I get wanting to respect someone, but he’s literally just a rich person. He’s not an engineering wiz.
This
The only Tesla car that is 100% Elmo’s idea is the cyber truck and well, it shows.
The guy is, in hisnown words, fully removed, and a serial liar. I don’t understand why anyone ever thought anything positive about him
Yeaaahhh… the upper limit of my engineering experience is as an e-bike/e-scooter mechanic. But that’s more than enough to know that I don’t want an aluminum frame on a vehicle going faster than 20mph.
Aluminum doesn’t handle torsion or vibration well. Like, at all. I’ve tried to bend aluminum handlebars back after they’ve suffered a short drop on a curb when the kickstand failed. If they’ve had enough, they just SNAP. Like fucking twigs. Now, for microvehicles that typically don’t suffer a lot of the kind of vibration that big aluminum parts have to take (think wind turbine blades and aircraft), that isn’t a big deal. They’re operating at low speed, and with prudent care, they last for decades.
However (and this is where I would be very grateful for the insight of actual metallurgists or material scientists), there’s a good fucking reason why the frame and chassis of the average personal vehicle is made of steel of a specific carbon percentage. It has better ductility than aluminum alloy, and can handle collisions better. It absorbs that kinetic energy by bending and then relaxing. It doesn’t shatter like aluminum does. That is a crucial crash-protection feature that makes the physics behind crumple zones and crash cages work.
Cybertrucks are death traps, they start with a shit frame that cannot protect passengers at high speed collisions (carrying an extremely heavy and highly flammable battery), and end with door handles that have no manual override. Fuck everything about these fucking lemons.
It wasn’t 100% him. He might have drawn the body with crayon because it certainly looks like it but he’s really not involved, he likes to pretend he is.
To be fair, it does look like he at least used a straight edge.
“The route of least intellectual resistance” is my new favorite insult.
I think he has an undergraduate degree in economics.
That’s a low blow.
I remember hearing that in Walter Isaacson’s hagiography it said something like “Musk continuously and ruthlessly pushes to first principles of physics”…
Maybe not so much
I wouldn’t be nearly so confident that data centers in space are impossible engineering, but it probably won’t happen in my lifetime or Elon’s.
I actually know someone who worked on the MIRI instrument & they keep going on and on about heat transmission in wiring being a huge challenge.
There’s no point, is the thing. It’s literally just moron tier bait for investors, almost a parody of itself (what if we built data centers, but in SPACE). Nobody needs that. The massive explosion in demand for compute is pointless in the first place anyways.
They are absolutely possible technology and could be constructed in such a way as to be viable.
Cooling in spaces a massive pain in the arse but if you do it at large enough of a scale it actually becomes efficient.
The problem is we need access to a space elevator before we could build at that scale otherwise you’d be sending up hundreds of rockets just to build data center 20% the size of anything we could construct on Earth. Which would obviously be pointless.
So Elon Musk should be working on a space elevator. Except he can’t because that would involve advanced physics and material engineering, both of which he is crap at, given the fact that he tried to make a car out of pig iron.
To be clear, they are absolutely possible. There’s nothing preventing them with today’s technology beyond cost.
That doesn’t make musks statements correct. You can’t “easily” cool things in space. Virtually none of the conventional cooling methods work as most rely on heat moving from hot thing to cold thing, that cold thing usually being air in the end. But in space, where there is only vacuum and no air, heat will just build up until whatever is heating it breaks.
As the original tweet said, you can still get rid of heat, but it’s much slower (unless you’re ejecting super heated material regularly) and is quite inefficient.
The best cooling solutions I’ve seen suggested is to use the waste heat to power an IR laser, and just dump gigawatts of power overboard. If you are primarily relying on solar power to keep the operation going the inefficiency doesn’t really matter.
The inefficiency isn’t in the power consumption, it’s in material or time waste.
You can easily remove the heat if you dump it all into a material and then jettisoning that out. The problem is, you need to replenish that material quite often, and that becomes rather inefficient.
You can also radiate the heat out, but that takes a very long time unless you’re willing to utilize a relatively extreme amount of weight and material to that end. It is much much slower than in atmosphere.
An IR laser doesn’t really sound viable to me? They take a boatload of energy, and a huge part of laser design is dealing with the heat the laser produces. I don’t really see how you could a) collect the heat b) turn that into a way to power the laser and c) deal with the lasers heat output, that wouldn’t do more than dump a fraction of the needed heat.
That’s what I mean about scale. If these things are large enough then you can have huge power plants connected to them, but this would be more a several mile across space station than a satellite. Which is why you would need a space elevator first. Help you probably don’t even need the space station you could probably put all this processing on the counterweight asteroid. It might as well do something.
But we are decades if not centuries of being able to do that.
Elon is mad that a scientist is pointing out the flaws in his latest grift.
There never were going to be data centers in space, that’s just another way to dupe investors.
The science is sound. Otherwise a Thermos would be as effective at keeping things hot as any other bottle.
Honestly though, how fucking naive do you need to be to ever think Elon was a competent engineer?
We’re still trying to find the bottom of that barrel unfortunately
Let’s be very clear about one thing: Musk is not an engineer. He employs engineers, but he is not an engineer himself. He has given himself the title of Chief Engineer at SpaceX, but that’s no different than me giving myself the title of Chief Surgeon. It’s meaningless. The actual engineers at Tesla and SpaceX are very capable, though perhaps misguided, as one would have to be to work to further the interests of a megalomaniacal mega-dork like Musk. Unfortunately, many of these actual engineers must also have a kind of cult-like, sycophantic devotion to Musk, which is why none of them have the guts to tell him that AI data centers in space is a stupid fucking idea.
Rocket science is really cool. Rocket scientists are huge geeks about rocket science. If there are really only a handful of organizations hiring rocket scientists (and most of them are run by megalomaniacs or deeply entwined with the MIC), you’re faced with the prospect of working for a bad company, or not working on your passion that you specialized in.
I remember some AMAs from The Site That Shall Not Be Named by SpaceX employees, and a common comment was that they do their best to keep him distracted so they can do their actual work because his ideas are stupid.
Somehow we have to restructure our society so that no one has to be beholden to men like Musk. We have to end this plutocracy. We need to replace it with a meritocracy. Or, we could be really radical and replace it with >gasp< democracy.
TBF, I’m not confident he is human. I mean, if it went public that he’s not, would anyone be surprised? Ofc, Zuck’s more likely to sprout that leak, but still. Would we?
Rocket surgery, even more so.
Also, can we start referring to ridderp as “TSTSNBN” or “tstsnbn”? 🤣
(or, “ts2nbn”?)
Mega-dork is way too weak. He is a full blown Nazi and wants nothing but more power, money, influence etc.
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You don’t really need a cult following, either. Most engineers just want to get paid well for their hard work and experience. Does Musk pay well? I don’t know. But it’s hard for me to believe so many smart people work for him just because of a cult following.
No, he does not pay well. His companies base bay is generally about 10-20% under market, and they are all 5 days in office.
The only reason you work there are for stock grants, you love his politics, or because your a true believer in the mission.
I guess you don’t become the world’s richest man by paying people fair wages.
In fact, history shows that it’s literally impossible. 🤢
Every single penny those fucks have is ours, by right. 🤷🏼♂️
It should be (and might be?) illegal for him to call himself an engineer unless he graduated from an accredited school with a degree in engineering
That’s only a thing in Canada I believe.
you can bet the few that have the guts are quickly fired, so, the proportion remains
mega-dork
Hey now, let’s leave the poor whale dicks out of this. 🥲
Dude, the only thing Musk engineered in his life were Tesla stocks.
One would think an academic would realize that the hype man doesn’t actually do any engineering.
It’s an idea that would work much better after a few more years when the chips are mature and not changing as much and you have a moon base producing aluminum metal and then you can use the waste rock as radiators with a little bit of moonwater cooling. Doing it now is the worst time.
Yeah a data center, on earth or in space, sits on a ton of infrastructure. It is foolish to even mention the cherry on top when you don’t even have a cake yet.
First we industrialize cis lunar space then we industrialize the moon then we’ll see about data centers in space.
Apropos then that fElon prefers to declare he’s placing said cherry on top and the rest of his cult scrambles to design, manufacture, and position said cake directly under the cherry’s forecasted destination vector. ☝🏼
If you haven’t already, you should read Artemis.
Did I hear aurora. That bullshit book by ksr? Let me see, you mean the Andy weir one. Yes I read it. It was good but a pretty tame setting with mass measured in grams. Very small scale. I don’t think we will have so much skilled 0g welding. Easier to use a robot or just slather it in a ton of mass and brute force it.
That is the thing that annoys me most. Getting heat away in vacuum / space is super complicated. Plus, what if a component breaks down? You can’t send an engineer to replace a faulty cable.
You are fully r_tarded.
…according to Musk. But to anyone with an IQ above room temperature, you’re absolutely correct.
I don’t use twitter, this is satire right? cause if this is a real conversation im glad i was never on twitter to begin with lol
This is kinda what Twitter always was. It’s what happens when you sort by author instead of by topic.
Elon never was an engineer. He hired amazing engineers who managed to make amazing things despite his constant incompetent meddling.
Not even that. Brilliant people made brilliant things, word reached his vulture ear, and he bought their company.
People, stop giving your money to schmucks. Don’t let them buy your company, take control, and fuck shit up. Aim for sustainability, not impossible growth.
Oh he didn’t buy it. He placed loyal people in the board of directors and had them vote to give him control of the company. He didn’t buy it, be stole it.
