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I look forward to the day we have orbital embedded ML. Comms take 3-6 magnitudes more energy than the rest of an embedded system so less comms use leads to a positive feedback loop of more energy and compute available for sensor reads, inferencing, and analysis.

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Is communication that expensive energy-wise? Is this just a thing in space given the transport medium or a general rule?

I don't know enough physics to comment on the effect of different media on EM emissions but from what I understand any potential effects would not be significant enough to negate an order of magnitude difference due to the the nature of broadcasting or even beam-forming a stream of data v.s. sending it down a physical channel that is in comparison a point to point use of resources to manipulate bits (ALU ops, SRAM r/w, Flash r/w).

Might be able to find the paper I'm referencing. Will post tomorrow.

Figure 2.2: Energy cost of different operations on 32-bit values in a leading 45nm foundry process

https://people.csail.mit.edu/jrk/jrkthesis.pdf (Page 21)

Thanks!

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