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Comment by BadBadJellyBean | Hacker News Reader

I have the feeling that the only reason that might actually be done is to escape from any kind of jurisdiction. In space no one can hear you compute.

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The Outer Space Treaty [1] says "A State Party to the Treaty on whose registry an object launched into outer space is carried shall retain jurisdiction and control over such object", so no escaping jurisdiction.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty_of_1967#Ar...

Resurrect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Dragon_(rocket) , launch it 'anonymously' from international waters?

It doesn't say anything about launch location, and you'd need to ship it out there from a country using a large (registered) boat. That loophole won't work.

Staying with exploiting loopholes, that happens all the time with ships, while at sea, in international waters.

I think I've read something about similar things happening with new airliners for fiscal reasons.

OFC that doesn't really erase the track, but one could engage in rented or owned 'lawfare' by then?

It is worth noting that this is also identical to the way in which international waters works as well, so there's plenty of legal precedent.

But it's also irrelevant: all your infrastructure supporting such a thing, including your ability to fund it, is on Earth, in someone's jurisdiction.

The US government is hardly going to say "well the datacenter is in space, guess there's nothing we can do about the owner who lives in California..."

If that's the case, wouldn't it be better to just put it in the desert? Realistically, if noise from calculations is the problem, placing it in a remote area would be more economical.

The desert is still under someone’s jurisdiction. Perhaps the best on-planet comparison is creating a man made island in the middle of the ocean.

This also seems more sensible than space, although I guess if you’re in international waters then no military will protect you and someone could eventually destroy it. Way more organizations have the ability to blow up a boat is compared to a space station.

It's a play on "in space no-one can hear you scream", not a literal "compute is so noisy we need to go to space"

The jurisdiction issue is the bigger one. Deserts don't solve this; International waters, possibly do, but then you've got other issues.

Is that so? How embarrassing. I'm not a native English speaker, so I didn't understand the metaphor.

You don't get that with the current plans which require them to have FCC licences and be constantly replacing them by launching from the United States though...

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