zlacker

Raise the temperature of your radiator by 50 degrees and you double its emission capacity. Or put your radiator in the atmosphere and multiply its heat exchange capacity by a factor of a thousand.

It's not physically impossible. Of course not. It's been done thousands of times already. But it doesn't make any economic sense. It's like putting a McDonald's at the top of Everest. Is it possible? Of course. Is it worth the enormous difficulty and expense to put one there? Not even a little.

>>wat100+(OP)
For thousands of years we never even looked to Mount Everest, then some bloke on the fiver said he’d give it a shot. Nowadays anyone with the cash and commitment can get the job done.

Same with datacenters in space, not today, but in 1000 years definitely, 100 surely, 10?

As for the economics, it makes about as much sense as running jet engines at full tilt to power them.

>>aunty_+51
> some bloke on the fiver said he’d give it a shot

Hillary (he features on the NZ Five Dollar note) was one of those guys who does things for no good reason. He also went to both poles. This only tells us that it is indeed possible, but not that it's desirable or will become routine.

>>aunty_+51
If we define a data center as a place where computers run primarily to serve distant users, then we've had data centers in space for decades.

Nobody should doubt that it's possible, since it's been done. It just doesn't make any sense to do it purely for the sake of having computers do things that could be done on the ground.

There's nothing weird about using jet engines to make electricity. The design of a turbine designed to generate thrust isn't necessarily that different from a turbine designed to generate electricity. You can buy a new Avon gas turbine generator today, the same engine used in the Canberra, Comet, Draken, and many others. It makes about a million times more economic sense than putting GPUs in space to run LLMs.