OK, sometimes you have to fight the odds, push technology to the limit to make the unimaginable possible to achieve something great.
But I still do net see the benefit of putting data centers into space. Even after solving all those problems that are mentioned by the article, what is the upside compared to just building a data center with solar panels and a big battery down on earth? Even powering them with gas turbines seems to be more environment friendly and cost efficient than shooting thousands of rockets into space and have the data centers burn up in the atmosphere after 6 years.
Burn the land and boil the sea, You can’t take the sky from me…
The rich are not going to give up the Internet when Elysium becomes their new home. And you can’t trust the ground people to keep it running.
It keeps our AI overlords out of reach of mobs with torches and pitchforks.
Seriously, we’ve already got Flock, Palantir, Boston Dynamics, and fascism – we’re like one step away from killbots mowing dissidents down in the street.
The answer seems to be the same for many space ventures: “because we can”.
The article claims it is to test how computer chips function in space but, we’ve been sending computer chips into space for like 100 years, and the Earth’s orbit is practically littered with them now, so I think we have a good idea.
“teensy tiny data center” also known as a “computer”.
data “center”
- very far away, not central at all
- tiny, so it can’t “center” much
- radio contact only, so other places are probably faster to reach
Ok then.
STOP DOING AI (IN SPACE)
- DATA CENTERS WEREN’T SUPPOSED TO GO IN SPACE
- YEARS OF BUILDING SATTELIGES yet NO REAL-WORLD USE FOUND
…
“Hello i would like to connect to ai sattelite”
They have played us for absolute fools.
It’s to control space weapons. Much harder to jam and bomb an automated grim Reaper AI when it’s in orbit and has access to the space lasers.
But I still do net see the benefit of putting data centers into space.
I imagine that it’s less of an administrative process; less people to answer to
Space is one of the more regulated places (probably depends on ‘space’ definition tho).
Compared to what? And who is enforcing those regulations?
Compared to earth, governments and countries that signed Outer space treaties and there is a lot of administrative hurdles you need to overcome to launch even 1U cubesat (and it takes years) and you need to comply with your launch provider and you need to comply with eco and ethics requirements, and you need to comply with telecomunnication requirements, and you need to have a license to operate. There is a million requirements from a hundred differe nt bodies both domestic and international.
Or just grease the current US executive branch with some complimentary words, request permission to launch, and bam!
It’s not enough, there are a lot of institutions that require grease.
And yet I hear about startups getting permission to shoot shit up there on a weekly basis…
