We currently make around 1 TW of photovoltaic cells per year, globally. The proposal here is to launch that much to space every 9 hours, complete with attached computers, continuously, from the moon.
edit: Also, this would capture a very trivial percentage of the Sun's power. A few trillionths per year.
Think about it. Elon conjures up a vision of the future where we've managed to increase our solar cell manufacturing capacity by two whole orders of magnitude and have the space launch capability for all of it along with tons and tons of other stuff and the best he comes up with is...GPUs in orbit?
This is essentially the superhero gadget technology problem, where comic books and movies gloss over the the civilization changing implications of some technology the hero invents to punch bad guys harder. Don't get me wrong, the idea of orbiting data centers is kind of cool if we can pull it off. But being able to pull if off implies an ability to do a lot more interesting things. The problem is that this is both wildly overambitious and somehow incredibly myopic at the same time.
Depends on the deserts in question and knock-on effects: Saharan Dust Feeds Amazon’s Plants.
* https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/nasa-sat...
Helping vegetation in one place to grow may hinder it somewhere else. How important this is still appears to be an open question:
* https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-020-00071-w
I'm not sure if humans are wise enough yet to try 'geo-hacking' (we're already messing things up: see carbon dumping).