I think it is a great idea so long as the billionaires go there to stay with the data centres for maintenance purposes. They are the only geniuses who can do it!
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My new supervisor, the day I met him, was talking about how space data centers are a great idea ("because it's so cold up there!") and will be amazing when they're online. That's the moment I realized he was breathtakingly stupid. He may not believe in thermodynamics, but thermodynamics believes in him.
I guess I shouldn't have expected much given that he has a degree in finance and has worked in consulting for 10 years.
AI as a cultural phenomenon has been truly exceptional at revealing the extent to which the privileged are just literally mouth breathing thumb sucking mental invalids.
We should be laughing in their faces, when they say shit this stupid. We should be pointing out that they must have failed highschool physics, mocking them, to their faces, with a little bit of accidental spittle to drive it home.
We literally have to shame these fucking morons or they will destroy human civilization.
I love it when they bring up the dangers of AGI. Dude, what about the dangers right now? Cognitive offloading, psychosis, environmental damage, financial bubble, mass layoffs (I know it's mostly a pretense for that one)...
Yeah, maybe at some point it'll be capable to destroy us, but right now it looks like we're going to do that before it'll get there.
I felt exactly the same way about Elon Musk back in 2018(?) when he went on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and said the easiest way to terraform Mars was to just nuke the polar ice caps...and voila...instant atmosphere.
I don't think I've ever palm-slapped my forehead that hard in my life. All of a sudden I knew he was just another fuckin' moron with way too much money to burn.
Mars doesn't even have a magnetosphere, any atmosphere you create would fuck right off into space
And even if it worked (and it would take a LOT of nukes to work) ... well, congrats: now Mars has an atmosphere -- a highly radioactive atmosphere.
Thanks to Mars's lack of a magnetic field, high radiation levels are already a concern. Adding even more radiation into the mix really isn't going to help any of your terraforming goals.
And that's why we should just drop a few million cockroaches on Mars and let them figure it out! /s
Great. And now a few years later, Earth is being invaded by highly advanced mutant cockroaches from Mars.
I wouldn't mind if they weren't fucking ugly
If you make it fast enough it will stick around for a while. "A while" in planetary terms can be a few hundred thousand or million years. So it's possible you could produce sufficient atmosphere to make it breathable, and it would remain so for longer than human civilization up to now. Of course, by possible, I mean with the right tools and the resources to support that, which would be substantial. Feel free to find out how many comets you would have to impact into Mars to get that.
As someone with actual experience working in datacenters, this shit needs constant maintenance and repair. You can't afford to pay for my travel expenses to reboot a server.
There's a bunch of sealed underwater data centres and they found reliability went right up (see Project Natick). Underwater has the benefit of actually having cooling though ..
Yet Microsoft abandoned the idea because it was so fraught with commercialisation issues. Which is exactly what the experts are saying
Can't maintain, can't upgrade, can't repair, it pollutes the environment with abandoned shit and it doesn't scale
Reliability probably went up because of the extra expense put into making sure it won't immediately fail and need to be repaired
I'm not saying the space data centres are a good or even viable idea, just saying you can improve the reliability significantly if you try. The space data centre planis a non starter, there's nowhere for the heat to go.
Yes, investing in reliability will increase reliability
You can radiate the heat with a biiiig long radiator but it doesn't solve any of the other problems or improve commercial scalability
Right, I'm sure the hard radiation will help with that as well.
Everyone hyped on AI data centers is forgetting there's no air in space with which to conduct the heat away. A comparatively "tepid" human body could take over 24 hours to freeze solid in space because the only option is for the heat to radiate.
Than there's the part where disposable rockets and satellites like starlink are literally destroying the ozone CFC style.