[WNTR]
I heard talks about companies wanting to put datacenters in space
... And like, one question
No sure you will be able to solar power them whatever but ...
How
The FUCK
You gonna cool them???
[WNTR]
Like, am I insane or miss something huge or are they idiots???
Like, physics??? Space???
How will you cool these notoriously hot bitches that sometimes take entire LAKES for cooling??
[WNTR]
Like, this is the cooling the ISS uses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Control_System
And all they got there is a few humans, some science experiments, two computers and the regular exposure to sunlight
And they need *this* to cool it
How the hell you gonna cool a few fucking Blackwell towers???
[WNTR]
For reference, multiple data centers *on earth* had to halve their physical installation of data processing things with Blackwell because they **did not have enough cooling capacity for these new chips**
And they were massively overspecing their cooling solutions initially to be future proof
And you gonna tell me, you put that in fucking space???
[WNTR]
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/starcloud/
????
So... You telling me... They will be constantly exposed to sunlight to be powered.... But you also cool them by just, emitting infrared into space....
..... Are you drunk? You know satellites and shit rotate so they don't constantly expose the same side to the sun so they don't overheat? And they spend a good amount of time in earth's shadow to cool down again?
How, the everloving fuck, you gonna use this small ass solar panel to power a 10x compute box, while also not having this thing burn itself up in a few hours??????
[WNTR]
This is some fucking "pods" ass shit pseudo techbro bullshit again
[WNTR]
I swear to god I will start a fucking YouTube channel just to yell at Ai tech bros
@MiaWinter also, in general, it doesnt think the ppl who proposed this have any idea how incredibly expensive even the simplest space hardware is
@MiaWinter
Cold thing cools hot thing
Space cold
Ergo space cools hot thing
MOT
@MiaWinter some of them are just trying to deflect attention from the current environmental problems by suggesting that they’re all going be to solved soon by cool new technology, but probably most of them have no idea what they’re talking about. maybe they’ve heard that space is cold and don’t realise that it also conducts heat really badly?
[WNTR]
@SleepyCat that was what I had thought initially but like??? I know they keep taking the piss and talking absolute garbage but this is a new level of insanity
Like, next they tell us they gonna put the datacenters into the 5th dimension or some shit
@MiaWinter "my data center is in outer space" mfs when a ram stick fails:
It's very cold in space, it's especially cold when you're in shade.
Shade from the Sun via a solar panel would mean you're not getting heated from the Sun.
I hope that clears things up a bit.
[WNTR]
@limneticvillains I need you to clarify if you are joking or not because I am loosing my mind reading Ai-bro blogs about space datacenters rn
@MiaWinter Cooling is just one of many issues.
Here's my reply to someone who did the math on the MASS it would take to yeet into orbit to make something like that even remotely feasible:
[WNTR]
@nanianmichaels yea like
So many issues
My first thought was just, if you told this to a fucking 8th grader with mild space hyper fixation the first fucking question would be about heat
And they have literally no answer, to this simplest of questions
They didn't think about shit
@MiaWinter Im not joking, its very cold in space, there's no atmosphere to hold in heat, you need to be much closer to the Sun to get heated up above freezing if you're a singular object. (Edit, a singular object in shade).
It's that simple.
Apart from maintenance, the risk of solar flares, the cost and the issue with micro asteroids, it's not a bad idea to have computer intensive tasks done in orbit, you would remove the cost of cooling utterly.
[WNTR]
@limneticvillains are you fucking with me
As you said, there is no atmosphere in space, aka nothing to cool you down
Managing heat in space is one of the biggest fucking challenges of literally everything we put there, a lot of the engineering of satellites and the ISS gone into managing heat and cooling
Space is not cold, space is just empty. Cooling requires a medium, air, water, anything. Space is an insulator because it does not transfer heat
minor!
@MiaWinter @limneticvillains iirc [the tiny amount of stuff dispersed in]space is super cold but theres not enough stuff for the heat transfer
so basically space is technically cold but u are basically right since theres almost no heat transfer
@piku @MiaWinter You'd need big radiators to get rid of the heat, and they would need to stay shaded, but in general, it's cold out there, in the shade.
minor!
@MiaWinter @limneticvillains
but they do have good info here
@piku @MiaWinter Yeah, like I said, it's cold, in the shade. Like behind a solar panel.
@MiaWinter not to mention radiation
or like…… the cost???
in what universe is it going to be cheaper in the long run to build all the infrastructure to put one in space than in the middle of nowhere in Missouri or whatever
it’s almost like it makes no fucking sense
@MiaWinter they could have gone to YouTube and searched up “computer in space”, watched the fucking Linus Tech Tips video, and realized oh shit this is not a good idea
and YouTube search doesn’t even fucking work anymore
[WNTR]
@limneticvillains @piku "you need big radiators" is an understatement
A single, consumer grade GPU already produces heat at least 10 times as much as regular compute on a satellite
So you either shooting massive satellites in space to effectively put compute up there able to generate like 10 token/second on a small Ai model per user per satellite, or you gonna build an ISS level thing but with so much cooling on it you can see it from the fucking surface of the earth with your naked eye
minor!
@limneticvillains @MiaWinter where would the heat go?
https://www.amu.apus.edu/area-of-study/science/resources/why-is-space-not-always-cold/
There are three primary methods of heat transfer: convection, conduction, and radiation. Conduction occurs when heat is transferred from one solid object to another through direct contact.
For example, conduction is how your hand becomes burned if you touch a hot stove. But since spacecraft don’t touch anything in space, conduction is not a possibility for dispersing excess heat.
Convection occurs when heat is transferred through a medium such as air or water. For example, you can cool down the temperature of your body by turning on a fan or jumping in a swimming pool. But this is not an option for spacecraft, because space is a vacuum and there is no medium to allow heat to be transferred away from the spacecraft.
Finally, there is radiation – and this is really the only means of releasing heat in space. Radiation occurs when heat energy is emitted away from an object in the form of electromagnetic or thermal energy through waves of photons. The Sun uses this method to emit its energy out into the solar system, and it is the least efficient means of heat transfer by far.
Consequently, spacecraft need to employ specialized systems with water-cooled heat exchangers and cold plates to radiate excess heat into space. It turns out keeping spacecraft cool is actually a lot harder than keeping them warm.
this i imagine would be harder for databases since they generate a fuckton more of their own heat which needs to be removed
@piku @MiaWinter I know a guy with some ice cubes.
[0x636174]
@limneticvillains @MiaWinter @piku okay but what would they radiate to
there’s no air in space so its not gonna cool from convection, and the thermal radiation will be really slow, even in the shade
@Chloe @MiaWinter @piku They spill it as infrared radiation. They just need to be kept in shade. For instance you could have a solar panel on the moon and in the shade of a near by crator you have a bunch of computers and a large radiator.
Getting it up there would be an issue though.
[0x636174]
@limneticvillains @piku you’d have to have some seriously massive radiators for that to work, because again, its slow
@MxSpoon @MiaWinter but space is not only really hot but also an extremely good insulator (hot in the sense that the particles in the imperfect vacuum of space have high kinetic energies)
@charlotte
Well yeah, the earlier logic kind of fails to realize that space is sort of missing the "thing" part being mostly empty and all.
Hence you're left with just radiating heat.
@MiaWinter