zlacker

>>wiley1+(OP)
I've been saying for a long time that we should consider remote areas for building datacenters for batch processing.

At first I thought the poles (of the planet) might be good. The cooling is basically free. But the energy and internet connectivity would be a problem. At the poles you can really only get solar about three months a year, and even then you need a lot of panels. Most of Antarctica is powered diesel because of this.

So the next thought was space. At the time, launching to space was way too costly for it to ever make sense. But now, with much cheaper launches, space is accessible.

Power seems easily solved. You can get lots of free energy from the sun with some modest panels. But to do that requires an odd orbit where you wouldn't be over the same spot on earth, which could make internet access difficult. Or you can go geostationary over a powerful ground station, but then you'd need some really big batteries for all the time you aren't in the sun.

But cooling is a huge problem. Space is cold, but there is no medium to transfer the heat away from the hot objects. I think this will be the biggest sticking point, unless they came up with an innovative solution.

>>jedber+md
Perhaps I'm missing something, but if the only energy they get is coming from the sun, then they only need to dissipate that same amount of heat (minus whatever energy was needed for beaming data down to Earth).

>>ziofil+fh
What you're missing is that you'd have a huge solar array that powers something much smaller, so that energy gets concentrated into a small area.

>>bongod+Eh
That’s not how it works. With conservation of energy, all the energy coming in to power the computers has to be emitted somehow. Powering computers doesn’t get rid of the energy, it just makes it unusable and converts it into heat.

>>gbear6+jm
This is probably a stupid question but is it possible to recycle the heat back into electricity and use it again?

>>apitma+jx
In principle heat can be converted to work if there are two bodies at different temperature. In space heat can only be irradiated away since there’s no matter available for conduction, so I would think that eventually all of your machinery would thermalize with the environment and the boundary conditions. While there should be a temperature gradient between the side exposed to the sun and the one opposite to it, I’m not sure how much of this is actually harvestable.