- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/54084710
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Okay we all hate Musk, but calling the cooling of a datacenter in space “easy” is correct if you read “easy” as “something we already know how to do,” which is kind of how he talks. Pretending to dismiss the idea simply because space is a vacuum ignores realities like the ISS.
Anyway, if you want an explanation of cooling a space datacenter, this video by physicist/astronomer Scott Manly explains it in exhaustive technical detail. There’s some pretty good layman’s language at around the 15-minute point.
TL;DR: Yes, you could cool a large datacenter in space by doing various things we already know how to do.
The only skills Elon has is exploiting workers and milking the government for money. By all accounts he’s terrible at everything else
I remember hearing that in Walter Isaacson’s hagiography it said something like “Musk continuously and ruthlessly pushes to first principles of physics”…
Maybe not so much
I wouldn’t be nearly so confident that data centers in space are impossible engineering, but it probably won’t happen in my lifetime or Elon’s.
I actually know someone who worked on the MIRI instrument & they keep going on and on about heat transmission in wiring being a huge challenge.
There’s no point, is the thing. It’s literally just moron tier bait for investors, almost a parody of itself (what if we built data centers, but in SPACE). Nobody needs that. The massive explosion in demand for compute is pointless in the first place anyways.
They are absolutely possible technology and could be constructed in such a way as to be viable.
Cooling in spaces a massive pain in the arse but if you do it at large enough of a scale it actually becomes efficient.
The problem is we need access to a space elevator before we could build at that scale otherwise you’d be sending up hundreds of rockets just to build data center 20% the size of anything we could construct on Earth. Which would obviously be pointless.
So Elon Musk should be working on a space elevator. Except he can’t because that would involve advanced physics and material engineering, both of which he is crap at, given the fact that he tried to make a car out of pig iron.
To be clear, they are absolutely possible. There’s nothing preventing them with today’s technology beyond cost.
That doesn’t make musks statements correct. You can’t “easily” cool things in space. Virtually none of the conventional cooling methods work as most rely on heat moving from hot thing to cold thing, that cold thing usually being air in the end. But in space, where there is only vacuum and no air, heat will just build up until whatever is heating it breaks.
As the original tweet said, you can still get rid of heat, but it’s much slower (unless you’re ejecting super heated material regularly) and is quite inefficient.
The best cooling solutions I’ve seen suggested is to use the waste heat to power an IR laser, and just dump gigawatts of power overboard. If you are primarily relying on solar power to keep the operation going the inefficiency doesn’t really matter.
The inefficiency isn’t in the power consumption, it’s in material or time waste.
You can easily remove the heat if you dump it all into a material and then jettisoning that out. The problem is, you need to replenish that material quite often, and that becomes rather inefficient.
You can also radiate the heat out, but that takes a very long time unless you’re willing to utilize a relatively extreme amount of weight and material to that end. It is much much slower than in atmosphere.
An IR laser doesn’t really sound viable to me? They take a boatload of energy, and a huge part of laser design is dealing with the heat the laser produces. I don’t really see how you could a) collect the heat b) turn that into a way to power the laser and c) deal with the lasers heat output, that wouldn’t do more than dump a fraction of the needed heat.
I think he has an undergraduate degree in economics.
That’s a low blow.
“The route of least intellectual resistance” is my new favorite insult.
Elon is mad that a scientist is pointing out the flaws in his latest grift.
There never were going to be data centers in space, that’s just another way to dupe investors.
The science is sound. Otherwise a Thermos would be as effective at keeping things hot as any other bottle.
This guy really thought Elon Musk was one of the engineers designing Tesla cars?
I get wanting to respect someone, but he’s literally just a rich person. He’s not an engineering wiz.
This
The only Tesla car that is 100% Elmo’s idea is the cyber truck and well, it shows.
The guy is, in hisnown words, fully removed, and a serial liar. I don’t understand why anyone ever thought anything positive about him
People wanted him to be a Tony Stark figure and he was more than happy to not correct them. You only need to read up on him a small amount to realise he’s a hype and money guy and not an engineer.
Yeaaahhh… the upper limit of my engineering experience is as an e-bike/e-scooter mechanic. But that’s more than enough to know that I don’t want an aluminum frame on a vehicle going faster than 20mph.
Aluminum doesn’t handle torsion or vibration well. Like, at all. I’ve tried to bend aluminum handlebars back after they’ve suffered a short drop on a curb when the kickstand failed. If they’ve had enough, they just SNAP. Like fucking twigs. Now, for microvehicles that typically don’t suffer a lot of the kind of vibration that big aluminum parts have to take (think wind turbine blades and aircraft), that isn’t a big deal. They’re operating at low speed, and with prudent care, they last for decades.
However (and this is where I would be very grateful for the insight of actual metallurgists or material scientists), there’s a good fucking reason why the frame and chassis of the average personal vehicle is made of steel of a specific carbon percentage. It has better ductility than aluminum alloy, and can handle collisions better. It absorbs that kinetic energy by bending and then relaxing. It doesn’t shatter like aluminum does. That is a crucial crash-protection feature that makes the physics behind crumple zones and crash cages work.
Cybertrucks are death traps, they start with a shit frame that cannot protect passengers at high speed collisions (carrying an extremely heavy and highly flammable battery), and end with door handles that have no manual override. Fuck everything about these fucking lemons.
It wasn’t 100% him. He might have drawn the body with crayon because it certainly looks like it but he’s really not involved, he likes to pretend he is.
To be fair, it does look like he at least used a straight edge.
Look at the like counts. It’s his platform, so unsurprising.
I don’t use twitter, this is satire right? cause if this is a real conversation im glad i was never on twitter to begin with lol
This is kinda what Twitter always was. It’s what happens when you sort by author instead of by topic.
A quick google search aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand
https://www.weforum.org/stories/artificial-intelligence/space-data-centres-cooling
Scale ISS-style hardware to the modest 1 megawatt data centre, and the mass is punishing: roughly 100 tons of radiators alone. By comparison, 1 megawatt of cutting-edge AI compute racks is on the order of 10 tons. That is the economic knife edge: the radiators alone could weigh close to ten times more than the compute hardware. Since launch cost scales with mass, cooling could impose an order-of-magnitude launch-cost penalty, before the first token is generated.
Also; slop?
idfk I’m more agreeing with the guy and the article leans towards the guy being right too. I am not a scientist.
It’s crazy though that elon musk, the person who owns SpaceX, didn’t know about the radiation thing.
He did. He is pushing the concept of space data centers because he OWNS the launch systems that would put them up there. All those exploding costs because of the launch mass they talk about? Yea those costs would go to him.
Honestly though, how fucking naive do you need to be to ever think Elon was a competent engineer?
We’re still trying to find the bottom of that barrel unfortunately
The partially intellectually delayed response of a fellow autistic… I’ve been there buddy but you’re better off explaining your answer long-hand than just insulting.
If you claim to be a high IQ individual that’s some kind of savant on the spectrum, when those moments arise, those are the moments where you’re supposed to be able to recall information at the drop of a dime.
I think that musk showed his intellectual delay.
That is the thing that annoys me most. Getting heat away in vacuum / space is super complicated. Plus, what if a component breaks down? You can’t send an engineer to replace a faulty cable.
You are fully r_tarded.
…according to Musk. But to anyone with an IQ above room temperature, you’re absolutely correct.
Elon, a grown ass child man dropping the hard R word. wtf
Zero respect for this man child. And dropping the R word is probably the least offensive thing he had done. I lost respect for him a long time ago. I wouldn’t look his way if he wanted to stop and chat. What a wanker.
hard R word
Just a gentle reminder that the phrase “hard R” refers to an entirely different insult. Though, I wouldn’t be surprised if Elon used that word, too.
Good thing I said “hard R word”, then.
But yeah, I’m sure he sprinkles some N words throughout his day.
lol what word is that?
cocksuckeR
I don’t wish him on any cocks, TBF. 😅
The n word with a “hard r” at the end. The word Elon used is generally referred to as the “R slur”
Also,
Teslas are great cars
The heck?!
Good engineers designed and worked on them. Elon might be a tool but that doesn’t mean everything in Tesla is bad.
They may’ve been great when said engineers still had hands on them, but they were rapidly enshittified directly after leaving the womb.
Unlike fElon, who’s been absolute shite since before his two gametes even met.
I didn’t say everything about them is bad. I merely strongly disputed that they are “great cars”.
Just one random anecdote: My colleague has a Tesla, and his trailer ball… thing… Whatever it’s called in English, came off during towing, while driving. The load was way under specification maximum weight.
The whole thing underneath just let go of the rest of the car. Could’ve been a fatal accident for any vehicle near the event. I’ve never heard of that happening in my life lol. So many other problems with his car, too.
Was it first person/tesla installed hitch? I didn’t know they sold one. https://shop.tesla.com/product/model-3-tow-package
But it could be an after market one.
Installed by first party, yes. Had to drive almost across the country to have it repaired, too. Not something a simple mechanic shop could fix. One more reason why it’s shit.
The Model S and 3 were great cars when they came out. They redefined what a car can be. Now they’re technologically stale because the rest of the industry has overtaken them in many areas. The Semi is by now an also-ran. The Cybertruck was always a crock of shit. Tesla could have done great things in the automotive space if they wanted to. Instead they concentrated on selling snake oil.
I think the latest 3 and Y are quite good because Musk was distracted by cybertruck and space x.
But they are getting left behind.
They’re quite good but they’re not class leading like they used to be. They were way ahead of the competition but then threw that away for Musk’s pipe dreams.
