Which means either the United States has or will be doing this, and this offers humanity no comfort. Exponential feedback loops on a road to nowhere on tracks coming to an end. There is no reason to be hopeful. Every little discovery, every little innovation all goes to the military industrial complex of all countries just to slaughter poor people. China is a capitalist country, Russia is a capitalist country, Iran is a capitalist country, Israel is a capitalist country, the United States is a capitalist country, Europe is full of capitalist countries. No War but the Class War.
it seems a bit disingenuous to call these “data centers in space” or “super computers”.
30 terabytes of storage across 12 satellites? So 2.5 TB each and 744 tops (which is like, a modern mid range graphics card for a PC, the RX 9070 XT does 1557 tops for reference). Like that just sounds like they’re launching a powerful PC in to orbit. Like, that’s a lot of power for a satellite, for comparison the curiosity rover is using the same kind of CPU as a 2000 era imac G3, but it’s not a data center.
The idea of doing more processing of the data on the satellite rather than processing it on the ground is interesting and neat, but representing these as anything more than that is… weird.
12 of 2800 planned have been launched.
That’s still not very much compared to most data centers. Like, 7000 terabytes is a lot of storage for one person, but it barely even registers compared to most modern data centers.
Also, 2800 desktops networked together isn’t really a super computer or a data center.
such a network is interesting as a scientific tool for gathering and processing data, certainly, but not a data-center and not a super computer.
I thought this was going to be unviable because cooling megawatts of power passively by radiation alone is hard? That’s been overcome somehow then? The article just says “Orbital data centres can use solar power and radiate their heat to space”.
I did wonder in the past about using a large heat pump to make the heat fins much hotter, which should accelerate cooling. But just an armchair thought. Any info on how this is/will be cooled?
edit: I also wonder what happens when an SSD goes bad… do they just expect storage capacity to decrease over time, or is there some maintenance mechanism to send up fresh drives? So many questions…
These are likely only using a few kilowatts, calling them data centers or super computers is an absurd hyperbole.
I would imagine some sort of heat pump is being used to transfer the heat from the electronics to the radiators. I still wonder how they’re dealing with the heat.
Fun fact, this isn’t all that effective because of the compressor heat/inefficiency. You get some benefit, but you also introduce moving parts and complexity.
LOTS of radiators.
Seems like ocean supercomputers would be more viable…
What could go wrong?
Literally everything
Nah, as long as it has Quantum and AI it’ll be fine
No blockchain to keep it tethered to the floor
The beginnings of the Matrioshka Brain
We just keep inching closer and closer to Planetes instead of Star Trek
That is certainly a description…
On a routine debris collection run, Yuri Mihairokov finds a compass, the only keepsake of his deceased wife, and is rescued by Hachirota “Hachimaki” Hoshino. Pilot Fee Carmichael stops the terrorist plan by ramming the Toy Box into the satellite and knocking it off course, sacrificing the Toy Box in the process.
What terrorist plot? What does that have to do with the compass?
All I can say is that the Wiki article is not representative of the show or the manga.
I forgot that anime existed
“Professor Klaus, no! The results have not been confirmed!”
I hope they don’t assemble it ‘The Verge Way’
Skynet is Made in China. That figures.
