zlacker

>>g-mork+(OP)
Either this is a straight up con, or Musk found a glitch in physics. It's extremely difficult to keep things cold in space.

>>alangi+u6
what makes you believe this?

radiators can be made as long as desirable within the shade of the solar panels, hence the designer can pracitically set arbitrarily low temperatures above the background temperature of the universe.

>>Doctor+Ca
these same comments pop up every time someone brings up satellite data-centers where people just assume the only way of dissipating heat is through convection with the environment.

>>eldenr+Ub
No, we just "assume" (i.e. know) that radiation in a vacuum is a really bad way of dissipating heat, to the point that we use vacuum as a very effective insulator on earth.

Yes, you can overcome this with enough radiator area. Which costs money, and adds weight and space, which costs more money.

Nobody is saying the idea of data centers in space is impossible. It's obviously very possible. But it doesn't make even the slightest bit of economic sense. Everything gets way, way harder and there's no upside.

>>wat100+Md
The radiators would be lighter compared to the solar panels, and slightly smaller surface area so you can line them back to back

I don't think dissipating heat would be an issue at all. The cost of launch I think is the main bottleneck, but cooling would just be a small overhead on the cost of energy. Not a fundamental problem.

>>eldenr+Nf
The pertinent thing is that it’s not an advantage. It may be doable but it’s not easier than cooling a computer in a building.

>>wat100+9p
The distinction is that you don't need to compete for land area, that you don't cause local environmental damage by heating say a river or a lake, that you don't compete with meatbags for energy and heat dissipation rights.

Without eventually moving compute to space we are going to have compute infringe on the space, energy, heat dissipation rights of meatbags. Why welcome that?!?

>>Doctor+bT
How efficient is thermal radiation through a vacuum again?

Sure, it occurs, but what does the Stefan–Boltzmann law tell us about GPU clusters in space?

>>defros+pU
> How efficient is thermal radiation through a vacuum again?

I provided the calculation for the pyramidal shape: if the base of a pyramid were a square solar panel with side length L, then for a target temperature of 300K (a typical back of envelope substitute for "room temperature") the height of the pyramid would have to be about 3 times the side length of the square base. Quite reasonable.

> Sure, it occurs, but what does the Stefan–Boltzmann law tell us about GPU clusters in space?

The Stefan-Boltzmann law tells us that whatever prevents us from putting GPU clusters in space, it's not the difficulty in shedding heat by thermal radiation that is supposedly stopping us.