zlacker

You're thinking of outer space. At any distance away from earth where space is so thin that heat dissipation is impossible, then the speed of light will be prohibitive of any workloads to/from space. there is plenty of altitude above the karman line where there is enough atmosphere to dissipate heat. Furthermore, i don't know if they figured it out, but radiation can dissipate heat, that's how we get heat from the sun. Also, given enough input energy (the sun), active closed-cooling systems might be feasible.

https://www.nasa.gov/smallsat-institute/sst-soa/thermal-cont...

But I really hope posts like this don't discourage whoever is investing in this. The problems are solvable, and someone is trying to solve them, that's all that matters. My only concern is the latency, but starlink seems to manage somehow.

Also, a matter of technicality (or so I've heard it said) is that the earth itself doesn't dissipate heat, it transforms or transfers entropy.

>>notepa+(OP)
> At any distance away from earth where space is so thin that heat dissipation is impossible, then the speed of light will be prohibitive of any workloads to/from space.

Why would they need to get data back to earth for near real time workloads? What we should be thinking about is how these things will operate in space and communicate with each other and whoever else is in space. The Earth is just ancient history

>>ericma+71
I feel like this is an incredibly fantastic goal-post-moving from the original announcement.

SpaceX: "we're going to put datacenters in space"

HN comments: "obviously we'll need to move human civilization into space first for this to make sense. checks out."

>>reveri+cb
I wasn’t responding to the original announcement, I was responding to someone who presumed that these data centers need to send data back to earth.

I was making a snide comment that certain ultra wealthy people don’t need these data centers to send data to earth, because they don’t plan on being here.

>>ericma+gQ
Ah. Apologies, that went right over my head!

>>reveri+o61
All good haha I didn’t do a good enough job with it :)