this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2026
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Enough Musk Spam
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So, you know how a good thermos keeps its contents hot or cold, depending on what you put in it?
You know the trick they use to do that? They use a vacuum.
Heat can be passively transferred using convection, conduction and radiation. Convection requires the movement of fluid, there's no fluid in a vacuum so that can't happen. Conduction requires that one vibrating molecule causes another adjacent molecule to vibrate. Again, not possible in a vacuum because there are no molecules to transfer that vibration. That leaves radiation.
(In a thermos it's not quite that simple. A thermos isn't floating in space, the outside needs to connect to the inside somehow, so even though there's a big vacuum bottle, the heat gets transferred through the parts that aren't in a vacuum.)
Radiation is possible in a vacuum, it's just really inefficient. People used to see radiation transfer in a vacuum all the time: incandescent light bulbs. They're much more rare these days. But, in that case a filament was heated up so much that it glowed white hot. To reduce the heat transfer, that white hot filament was put in a vacuum -- the bulb of the light bulb. If you ever touched one, you know they got hot. But, the filament was 2500 celsius, and the bulb itself was maybe slightly over 100C. That shows how inefficient radiation is. Even with something that's thousands of degrees, it only heated the glass of the bulb from say 20C to 120C.
So, it's hard to dump heat in space. The only thing that works is radiation, and radiation is much less effective when things are not glowing white hot. In addition, anything in space is getting heated up by the sun. So, not only do you need to dump any heat the device produces itself, it also needs to dump any heat it's receiving from the sun.
What are two of the main things that datacenters need? Power and cooling. The need for power is famous because it's driving up electricity costs. The need for cooling is well known because of all the water being used.
To meet the power needs, a datacenter would need massive solar panels to collect as much sunlight as possible. The solar panels on the ISS provide about 30kW of power. A small datacenter (and I mean small), uses 1 MW. So, for one small DC you'd need 30x the number of solar panels as on the ISS. If you're talking a conventional pre-AI datacenter, it's more like 100MW, so you'd need 3000x the number of solar panels as on the ISS.
Solar panels create electricity from sunlight, but by design they have to be facing the sun, which means they get heated up too. So, before you even turn on a computer in the DC, you have to find a way to dump all that heat that the solar panels are creating. Then, let's say you want to actually turn on the computers in the DC. On earth can be cooled by dumping water on something hot and letting water evaporate. That's really easy to do, and really cheap. You just move the heat from the computers into the water and it goes into the sky. But, in space, there's no sky to evaporate into, and no source of water. So, you need radiative cooling. Now, just imagine how much radiative cooling you'd need to match the performance of a simple "dump water on it" cooling system.
tl;dr: The idea of datacenters in space is ludicrous. Even someone as stupid as Musk knows that. But, investors are dumber than Musk -- or at least investors think that there are other investors that dumb, so they won't get stuck with the shares if they need to sell them. Musk needs the belief that datacenters in space to be possible or his shares all crash in value.
You know he only has a bachelors degree.. supposedly two from the same year. And both are suspicious. From University of Pennsylvania. Same university that trump has his from.
Bachelors in economics. And physics.
And he claimed he graduated in year. 1995. But no degree could be shown for like 10 years. And then when one finally surfaced in 2009, which magically was needed for a legal litigation , it had a different year on it. 1997.
The people he was in that legal battle with said he dropped out of college in 1995. Never finished his economics degree. Never studied physics.
It also wasn't a graduate level degree like he claimed.
It's highly suspicious because now he suddenly has two degrees for the same year. One in economics. And one in physics. 1997. When he was working on PayPal or something else. But had time to finish two degrees!?
The degree copies were made public 2009.after he made a very generous endowment.
Also the supposed bachelors of physics is an arts degree. Which is pretty unusual for a science based degree.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/musk-physics-degree/
Guy is a fraud. Bought two fake degrees.
Wasn't dean of university of Pen in the Epstein files?
https://www.phillyvoice.com/epstein-files-investigations-resignations-larry-summers-steve-tisch/
Anywho
He's not even an engineer. He actually didn't know about vacuum cooling.
Just like I didn't. Cause I'm also not educated in physics or engineering.
Lots of math degrees are BAs and double degree path is a thing, but yeah a lot of details don't add up.
Yeah I mean it's not impossible to have an arts degree in physics. Or two bachelors.
The only people I know with two bachelors got them at different colleges/universities. Or at the very least, usually many years apart.
Most people just have a minor if they are studying two main fields.
It's also sus he kept saying he has a graduate degree when he only has a 4 year degree. (In the U.S, at least, a graduate degree is a masters or PhD).
And even those two bachelors he has are questionable if he actually earned them. Or even one of them.
Even if he has a legitimate bachelors degree in physics. That level is just learning foundations. Not conducting research. Not developing anything new.
Just keep it on the dark side of the moon, duh.
There is actually a spot, the L2 Lagrange point, where something can orbit in a way where it's balanced from the sun's gravity and the earth's gravity, and as as a result anything orbiting there will continuously be in the earth's shadow.
That's where they put the James Webb space telescope, because being in the Earth's shadow means it can avoid interference by the sun and stay super cold, allowing it to take amazing readings of distant things.
Unfortunately, if you're out where the sun doesn't shine, your solar panels don't work very well, and for something as hungry as a datacenter, that's a problem.
How does earth cool? Through radiation. If the data centers stay on earth, earth will heat up. At some point there will be so many data centers that earth cannot take more heat.
The sun is continuously delivering 173 petawatts (PW) of energy to the earth, the biggest planned datacenter will have a capacity of about 1 GW, or 0.000001 PW.
The heat created through datacenters, and all other human activity combined, is minuscule compared to the incoming heat delivered by the sun. The reason climate change is an issue isn't that humans are doing things that generate heat, it's that by dumping CO2 into the atmosphere we're preventing the earth from being able to effectively radiate that heat back into space.
The amount of heat the earth normally radiates is roughly equal to the amount of heat the sun delivers. But, CO2 and other greenhouse gases are preventing the heat from radiating into space. Instead it gets trapped in the atmosphere, so the planet warms up.
AI will take what it gets. Have 100 million of the 1G datacenters and earth is heated by two suns. If earth should not boil, far less data centers are possible on earth, which only leaves space for more computation power.
Ok, once we get to 90 million 1GW datacenters we should start worrying. Currently we're approaching 1.
If you just keep adding data centers they will get too hot to stay functioning though, also there's such a thing as thermal equilibrium and heat transfer through radiation increases as the thermal gradient increases. But if you hypothetically could keep building more compute then eventually you'll reach a point where you can't keep it cold enough to run and it stops working, I'm not sure what the actual numbers would be like or how much space it would actually take but right now we're still orders of magnitude away from heating the planet up more than a few degrees. It's an insane amount of energy to heat up a planet sized object meaningfully.
I mean, yes, but that amount of heat is fairly negligible, especially relative to global warming from fossil fuel emissions.
There is no limit and with robots there can be exponential growth in construction velocity. Almost all available energy, including space solar farms and both nuclear energies, could be used for AI. If the data centers are on earth that will heat earth faster than radiation can cool it.
Mate go educate yourself first before you make an embarrassment out of you
You’re talking about things that have wildly different orders of magnitude as if they were similar.
You’re also ignoring that sending all that material into space is not efficient at all in terms of heat and emissions
Currently we have 240W in and out per square meter and have a 1W surplus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_energy_budget#Earth's_energy_imbalance_(EEI)
If all oil, coal and gas is burned, the greenhouse effect gets stronger. Earth heats up, more water evaporates, even less radiation reaches space.
Earth has 510 trillion square meters.
One current datacenter needs 100 MW. So 5 million datacenters would add another 1W per square meter. That's round about the output the nuclear fusion people are calculating. 500,000 1G fusion reactors would be needed instead of 10,000. https://www.iter.org/node/20687/will-fusion-run-out-fuel
That's not orders of magnitude off.
To put the data centers into space, not everything has to be lifted. If resources from the asteroid belts are used, only the starting materials and tools have to be launched.
Even if it is expensive, if earth cannot radiate more, any additional data center has to be in space.
How far up your ass did you pull up the 5 million datacenters from?
You’re just throwing random terms and numbers around at random thinking that makes you smart.
in trying to defend that we need data centers in space (regardless of its its feasible or not) because of the heat that they would generate on earth, you first ignore the energy (and monetary) cost of sending all of that into orbit and then justify that by saying that it’s feasible if we just do asteroid mining and space construction and assembly. Did I suddenly wake up in 2126 from my nap or what?
If we are that much worried now about earth heating up then maybe it would be more fruitful to think if we need this many data centers and why as well as other types of activities and social classes, before we go wild on wrecking the planet by launching massive constructions in space because we’ve wrecked the planet all so that certain people can add another 1 or 2 zeros to their bank account.
The 5 million doubles our energy surplus that causes global warming. That's where the number comes from, to understand the proportions.
We will have an arms race between China and the US. For national security, all caution will be thrown into the wind. "it would be more fruitful to think" - people won't.
Both sides will build as fast as possible, with the help of robots.
No, but with AI, progress will arrive faster.
There are a little more than 200k hospitals in the entire world.
What you are proposing is a data center for roughly 1.5k people. Not US and China, this includes the entire world. Now you get why your numbers are ridiculous?
You can’t just work your way backwards from a number that is convenient to you. This is why I said you are comparing things with vastly different orders of magnitude.
As I said before, please go educate yourself further because you continue this embarrassment
Have a nice evening.
The data centers are not for AI application but for development. I don't think there is an upper limit on AI improvement. So whatever can be built will be built.
Thanks, you too!