This is complete bullshit.
replyAnyone who thinks we’ll have data centres in space before we have a civilisation changing step up in surface to orbit space drives and materials science is an idiot.
How the hell does anyone think a rocket is ever going to compete with a prime mover towing two trailers, or an ocean going vessel.
We’re not exactly short of land.
And no, space is not cold.
All of this sounds a lot like how ULA, ESA thought reusable rockets were a pipe dream. These are engineering challenges, not physical laws that need to be broken.
replyyeah, but:
Data centers, fundamentally, are a solved problem. The rest is just cost balancing - and space looks like complete rubbish when it comes to all kinds of costs, including and especially when it comes to maintenance.
replyThis sounds like someone who concludes that FTL is possible because “once people thought that flight was impossible!”
replyBut we have and had ample evidence of flight in nature, we just didn’t understand how it worked. A similar search across the observable universe reveals no sign of FTL behavior.
Sometimes when you understand the science a comparison to some time when people didn’t isn’t as moving or compelling as you seem to imagine.
And all those conclusions take is cost to space to reduce 15 times; new cooling tech that isn't used anywhere to work at scale but only in space (if ground datacenters can use it too, their cost decrease); that ops cost line to not do anything useful so it can be just dropped; those 10mm radiation shields to not weight anything, because they didn't enter the costs; and that ground datacenters to use more expensive tech than they use today (just not improving is not enough).
replyWe will have space datacenters some day. But I'm not holding my breath.
We can just repurpose Deep Space 9, the Cardassians aren’t using it and nobody really cares about Bajor.
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