Yes, the physics are worse, and yes, the economics are worse, but data centers in space have the crucial advantage that they are out of range of the molotov-throwing arm of Joe Public (recently unemployed).
So bottom line a proof of concept for DARPA funds and eventual inegration into the military command and control nodes.
I suppose it is about being out of reach of cheap drones?
Both of which give the US military more persistent (revisit delay near zero because number of assets) and survivable (number of assets + LEO debris characteristics + cattle vs pets) ISTAR.
And an advantage in persistent ISTAR is a key enabler of the way the US military is aiming to fight a peer state adversary.
I'd be fascinated to dig into the contracts, but at 10,000' it's DoD offloading the bulk of the development cost onto NASA and the public (which in both cases, still gets good value for money).
Newer acronym, but apparently en vogue with the "How do we maintain a critical military space capability against someone who can shoot down exquisite satellites?" crowd.
if you're in a war where people are shooting your satellites out of the sky you're past the point where defenses matter. theres no grey war in space like russia hiring people to blow up stuff in europe and very few states could take out multiple satellites in space.
beyond that if we ever did get to that point, you could develop anti missile tech in space, you effectively have the high ground sitting at the top of the gravity well.
If space powers have any sense at all they'll develop a fleet of satellites that deploy small limpet craft that attach to the enemies' satellites and drag them toward earth.
Literal shooting sounds like mutually assured satellite destruction.
The internationally hoped for outcome should be that China continues scaling their orbital use, to the point where it becomes mutually advantageous to sign a treaty with the US banning orbital debris-creating weapons (and ideally imposing mutually-supported consequences on non-signatories who breach the agreement).
Then everyone would be left with more sane options of disabling-only (microwave, laser, targeted EMP, etc).
Starshield, on the other hand, has been directly funded by the US government to the tune of ~$9b in reported funding (much of it NRO or Space Force classified). It has ~250 satellites up as of now.
> A subsidy, subvention or government incentive is a type of government expenditure which redistributes from tax payers to individuals, households, or businesses. Subsidies take various forms, such as direct government expenditures, tax incentives, soft loans, price support, and government provision of goods and services.
SpaceX benefited from the italicized items in this definition.
Starlink didn't get any subsidies. There were reports in summer about them potentially getting 600 Mio (btw the broadband program is 40 billion heavy) and I can't find sources that SpaceX got any program founding yet.
If you don't count the launcher it rides on, and the company that owns both.
(No, "payment to launch this satellite" != "subsidy".)
You're correct that "we'll pay you to launch this satellite" isn't a subsidy. But "we'll pay you to develop this satellite launcher, and this cargo capsule, and this crew capsule, with the explicit goal of kickstarting a new launch provider" is.
Things like the EV tax credit also apply, considering Musk has leveraged his Tesla holdings to help SpaceX at times.
And to be clear: this was a very good use of public funds, whatever I think of Musk these days.
"$38 billion!", the Post shouts about in the headline, knowing full well that people will take away that every cent was a true, untrammeled, unconditional "subsidy", as opposed to government contracts that came after successfully meeting that early ambitious goal the NASA development contract laid out for SpaceX.
By that logic, every US university with federal funding is being subsidized à la Musk. Every small business that gets an SBA loan—the type of low-interest loan that the Post article highlights—is being subsidized. The NASA program that helped fund Falcon 1 were available to anyone with a promising design, and was contingent on meeting various milestones; to paraphrase the old saying about the early manned space program, no Buck Rogers, no bucks. SpaceX delivered the Buck Rogers.
Regarding Crew Dragon, SpaceX and Boeing each signed contracts as part of the Commercial Crew program for six operational manned missions. After SpaceX fulfilled its six, NASA awarded another contract for eight more (and just purchased a few more). Meanwhile, in addition to Boeing being paid substantially much for its half of the program, the company received a $300 million special, uncontracted payment in 2016 (not disclosed until 2019) to further accelerate development.
The Starliner flight that spectacularly ran into difficulties at ISS in 2024 was a pre-operational manned test mission (SpaceX's equivalent was done in May 2020). In other words, Boeing has not yet begun its six operational missions!
Getting back to the Post article:
>Government contracts to SpaceX from NASA and the Defense Department make up the majority of funds.
Again, this isn't the US government giving sacks full of cash to Musk just because it feels like it. Biden's NASA administrator Bill Nelson quoted a member of the Joint Chiefs as telling him that SpaceX had saved the US government $40 billion for just launching military payloads <https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/06/05/did-spacex-really-...>.
On the civilian side, SpaceX saved NASA $2 billion for just one payload, Europa Clipper <https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/a-year-from-launch-the...>, so who knows how many billions more from other launches.
That is correct.
> Every small business that gets an SBA loan—the type of low-interest loan that the Post article highlights—is being subsidized.
Yes.
> Meanwhile, in addition to Boeing being paid substantially much for its half of the program, the company received a $300 million special, uncontracted payment in 2016 (not disclosed until 2019) to further accelerate development.
"Boeing is subsidized" is not a controversial statement.
> On the civilian side, SpaceX saved NASA $2 billion for just one payload
Yes, this is why we do subsidies - they (potentially) pay off. We subsidize healthcare for poor people because it saves us money in the long run. We subsidize infrastructure because it helps the economy. We subsidize critical manufacturers for national security reasons.
How is it you're reading "x is subsidized" - a simple fact - to mean "subsidizing x is bad" - a matter of opinion that varies from subsidy to subsidy and company to company?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidy
"A subsidy, subvention or government incentive is a type of government expenditure which redistributes from tax payers to individuals, households, or businesses. Subsidies take various forms, such as direct government expenditures, tax incentives, soft loans, price support, and government provision of goods and services."
You and I, and everyone else, knows what "Musk got subsidies" means to the mentally reddited of the world:
>the US government giving sacks full of cash to Musk just because it feels like it.
That he should be grateful for the taxpayers support? That government interventions can, at times, be highly successful?
Do you base every conversation on "what would the dumbest Redditor think"?
Sadly, the mentally reddited are too numerous and widespread—including on HN—to always blightely ignore.
I'll answer my own rhetorical question. Your implication is that every single thing Musk and Musk's companies are doing today—Dragon, Crew Dragon, Falcon 9, Starship, xAI, Tesla, etc., etc.—are "subsidized"—again, with the "sacks of free money with dollar signs painted on them" connotation—because of that Falcon 1 program two decades ago. If believing that makes you feel better about the accomplishments of someone you admit to greatly disliking, congratulations.
And before you deny doing so, you are the one who wrote
>> Starlink didn't get any subsidies.
>If you don't count the launcher it rides on, and the company that owns both.
Maybe you're projecting your own beliefs about government subsidizing things a little on other people. The government made a risky bet; that's one of the important things governments exist for. Sometimes they pay off (SpaceX), sometimes they don't (Starliner).
Perhaps the next time someone correctly notes SpaceX got subsidized you might lead with the clear positive cost savings you eventually defended them with?
> What was your purpose in insta-citing that article…
It was the first reputable source that came up in Google? It gives several specifics that directly match the Wikipedia definition of a subsidy?
> because of that Falcon 1 program two decades ago
Falcon 1 got them the subsidies. It was the most unsubsidized part of SpaceX!
> If believing that makes you feel better about the accomplishments of someone you admit to greatly disliking, congratulations.
I can be a big SpaceX fan and still wish the man running it hadn't gotten brainworms.
> And before you deny doing so, you are the one who wrote…
Why would I deny that? I asserted Starlink has been subsidized, and stand by that claim. I'd thought we'd settled that point handily by now.
mfw
>I asserted Starlink has been subsidized, and stand by that claim. I'd thought we'd settled that point handily by now.
And here you were questioning my need to speak to the mentally reddited.
Even accepting the notion that a small NASA pay-for-performance program = "subsidy" = Falcon 1 (with Musk throwing his entire $100 million fortune into starting a cockamamie rocket startup despite having zero experience in the field having absolutely nothing to do with the rocket meeting the program's goals, of course), name the subsidies that resulted in Falcon 9, in vertical-landing Falcon 9, in Dragon, in Crew Dragon, in Starship, in Starlink, in Starshield. (And before you say it, Starlink was turned down for the FCC rural subsidy.)
>Perhaps the next time someone correctly notes SpaceX got subsidized you might lead with the clear positive cost savings you eventually defended them with?
As I said,
>Your implication is that every single thing Musk and Musk's companies are doing today—Dragon, Crew Dragon, Falcon 9, Starship, xAI, Tesla, etc., etc.—are "subsidized"—again, with the "sacks of free money with dollar signs painted on them" connotation—because of that Falcon 1 program two decades ago.
Again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidy
"Subsidies take various forms, such as direct government expenditures, tax incentives, soft loans, price support, and government provision of goods and services."
Tesla received low-interest loans (and tax credits for their customers). SpaceX was given funds (that'll be "direct government expenditures") to develop the Falcon 9, Cargo Dragon, and Crew Dragon (and now the lunar lander). Those funds were not conditional on completion of the program (as we've seen with Starliner); they were R&D funding in milestones in hopes of a functional spacecraft at the end.
> with Musk throwing his entire $100 million fortune into starting a cockamamie rocket startup despite having zero experience in the field having absolutely nothing to do with the rocket meeting the program's goals, of course
Again with the strawmen.
"You got subsidies" and "you had nothing to do with the success" are wildly different statements. You can be both an extremely hard worker and supergenius and still need government support for your very expensive good idea.
> Your implication is that every single thing Musk and Musk's companies are doing today—Dragon, Crew Dragon, Falcon 9, Starship, xAI, Tesla, etc., etc.—are "subsidized"—again, with the "sacks of free money with dollar signs painted on them" connotation—because of that Falcon 1 program two decades ago.
No, the opposite. Falcon 1 is the single least subsidized part of it. It was the one big bit Musk completely self-funded.
They demonstrated an ability to get to orbit (after almost going bankrupt), which gave NASA the confidence to subsidize them in a larger project.
Please, read, then react to it.
If SpaceX failed to deliver a working product after a receiving a bunch of incremental payments for the pre-delivery milestones (deliberately structured to prop up their early R&D), it might have ended up front and center as an example of government "picking winners and losers" gone wrong like how Solyndra was featured at the 2012 RNC.
Yes, but while I do not see the first, I can clearly see the latter :)
If real money can be made, there is no need of datacenters in space. Offer some country some money and they'll let you build whatever you want. The whole idea is entirely unprofitable thats why they are making up things that won't work economically. Keep giving us money indefinitely, we'll keep spending, money can be made after a few decades of spending ... trust us.
You'd need a dictatorship where people's voices don't matter, but then there's no right of ownership either.
And there are plenty of those countries. As well as countries that aren't dictatorships. Every leader everywhere is available for sale. In democracies, usually for a small sum. Dictatorships ask for a percentage of profit.
Everyone knows how the current administration got to power: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/01/politics/elon-musk-2024-e...
Trump will gladly allow datacenters to be built on federal lands. Just like he allows Oil/Coal and bans Wind and Solar. The only reason there is new story of Space Datacenters is because even if they are given everything by the Govt, it simply won't work.
If you see a datacenter in orbit, it means something went wrong on Earth: https://systemsthinkingcollection.substack.com/p/space-datac...
People believe all kinds of fiction and garbage, like going to Mars. (Why Terraform Mars When We Can Fix The Earth? https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8mhib97--n4)
The same argument holds for AI DCs. If you can build profitable AI datacenters in space, why can't you build profitable AI datacenters on Earth? The only reason is you can't build profitable AI datacenters on earth. Just give us a few more trillions and wait a decade or two, we promise ...
a: now you’re in everyone’s back yard, since satellites in orbit can be seen by the naked eye at twilight zipping across the sky, so now the whole earth hates you
b: you are still launching from earth, which is a pretty significant target if you’re worried about ecoterrorism.
Once you move outside low Earth orbit (i.e. outside the magnetosphere) you also have to deal with much more radiation so using regular commercially available hardware for the DC is no longer an option so you're looking at another 10-100x increase in cost for the chips alone (and at worse performance because radiation-hardened chips are literally generations behind at this point). You'll also need signficantly more (very heavy) shielding and that also adds to your launch costs. Of course OceanGate is a good reminder that billionaires don't always concern themselves with such trivialities as using equipment and materials actually suited for the task if it means they get an opportunity to brag about how they're disrupting the market by jerry-rigging mission critical components.
Speaking in terms of feasibility again, availability isn't the only problem you'd be facing. Obviously latency is going to be horrendous because of the incredible distances involved but really there's just literally no infrastructure you can piggyback off of. You could potentially achieve data rates of up to tens of Gbit/s even from L4/L5 (stable orbits 1 AU away) using something like NASA's DCOS but this requires optical ground stations or LEO relays, bringing the weakest link much more within reach again.
Even if you somehow manage to develop sufficiently ruggedized variants of reasonably modern chips, add the necessary shielding and develop and build out the necessary communication infrastructure from scratch (remember that we haven't even considered how we generate enough power to run the actual DC itself) and are also willing to accept the disgusting latency and packet loss ratio, the elephant in the room remains that DCs on the ground require constant maintenance to operate and replace failing parts. DCs in space can only ever be disposable - once any redundancies run out, they're just very expensive space junk.
But you have a point: putting it in space is inherently ridiculously expensive. Getting it to L4/L5 is only insignificantly more expensive than getting it to L1/L2 but assuming you can fit the entire DC in a single Falcon Heavy (so you don't also have to worry about assembling the entire thing in space across multiple launches) you're limited to a payload of 25 t and the launch itself already costs you $120 million. Of those 25 t only 7 t or so can be spent on actual compute so your space DC would probably be constrained to the equivalent of about 500 GPUs (assuming this is for AI because everything is for AI these days). Most of the weight budget and the actual cost however would be eaten by all the structural and infrastructural parts required - in terms of cost for compute a space DC that fits in a single Falcon Heavy is easily an order of magnitude more expensive than one built in the US today and those don't need to be replaced from scratch when a significant chunk of the initial parts have degraded.
TL;DR: Building a DC in space is easily 10x as expensive, requires technology that hasn't been developed yet, requires you to also build all infrastructure needed to actually operate and connect to it, and in the end just gives you a high latency low performance Beowulf cluster that is rapidly converting itself into an expensive piece of space junk if random debris doesn't kill it first.
You can run compute in low Earth orbit but compute runs hot. We're not talking 500 GPUs a pop but even for an 8 GPU node you need some 40 m^2 surface just for thermal dissipation. I assume by "distributed" you also imply that they're not going to be in sunlight 24/7 and operate more like Starlink so they'll need batteries to keep running for a third or so of their lifetime.
Low Earth orbit also means you don't have to worry about radiation frying your off-the-shelf hardware without the heavy shielding but you'll still have lots of random bit flipping to deal with and storage is largely going to be unreliable for anything but short-term, especially on SSDs.
Distributed also means you replace local speeds with network speeds - Google was only able to achieve feasible "data center" data rates by having satellites fly within less than a kilometer of each other (i.e. densely packed in space terms, no longer really "distributed" in terms of proximity) and even that had orders of magnitudes worse latency (obviously) than you'd have in a data center pod (though not quite as bad as the multi-millisecond latency you'd have at current Starlink level distances).
"Orbital data centers", even if operated as fleets of disposable low-performance pods instead of singular "out of reach" disposable mini DCs, are worse than real data centers on every single metric: they're slower, more expensive, unrepairable, degrade more rapidly and require more redundancy to compensate for random errors.
There are pretty much just three use cases:
- Providing space-based processing for space-based data collection to reduce the amount of data that needs be sent to ground (realistically speaking in the current climate this pretty much only describes surveillance).
- Avoiding regulatory oversight, permit processes and most risks (e.g. earthquakes, missile strikes, protests, sabotage) associated with building and operating a real data center.
- Avoiding energy price increases that might make operating a real data center more expensive compared to the fixed cost of continuing to operate an already launched satellite.
I'm surprised nobody seems to have pointed this out but one of the biggest factors in the premises that would make this entire idea somewhat economically viable (assuming energy prices increase in ways that affect data centers without also massovely affecting the supply chain for launching things into space) is Musk's claim that they not only can make the upper stages reusable and recover them but also that inspecting, refurbishing and reusing them will be considerably cheaper than replacing them. If they can't make launches significantly cheaper still (not that they aren't already ridiculously cheap all things considered), using a fleet "designed to be distributed across hundreds or thousands of satellites" would be economically unviable compared to just stuffing a single satellite to the brim (especially if you can avoid the battery).
But then the single advantage becomes "it's in space" and that is really only interesting for compute running on data already collected in space - and if that is a problem big enough to be able to sustain an entire business model justifying SpaceX's valuation... well, let's just say that would be the kind of world where if it were a movie the major plot point would be the destruction of that company or defeating the regime that enables it.
This so much. Good luck destroying a DC on earth without a very strong force. On the other hand, destroying a rocket on its launchpad just take one FPV drone.
Leaving aside the DCs already destroyed in the Iran totally not a War by an enemy that can be easily crushed at any moment ...
DCs in mainland US aren't well defended - a pattern of shrapnel heads landed by a mobile mortar or two with a 2 km radius would render most in need of some upkeep.
When you start describing rabble level opposition that high you run out of ceiling very quickly.
The US is filled with ex service personal who can whip together a mortar, as "military hardware" goes it's on par with what civilian firework techs have access to and can build in a garden shed, it's home grown resistance level guerilla tech.
If there's growing ground swell opposition to US data centres then the same Y'All-Qaeda militia plotting against dams and power substations will feel empowered to have a shot at a DC or too.
I don't think the US have the social fabric needed for an insurgency to develop on though.
Who said anything about civil war?
The US has many splinter loon groups who blow up buildings and like to attack infrastructure (see: US news). This has happened over the past decades with no civil war.
Data centres are soft targets - softer than banks. Do you remember when armed bank robberies were all the rage in the 1970s and 1980s? Not a time of civil war, just a time when a couple of people took control of buildings while heavily armed. Such a small group with fragmentation grenades can easily render a data centre unfit for use for several months with relative ease and fast ingress and egress.
Politically motivated armed attacks are a totally different thing.
Also, I think you massively underestimate the sheer size of an IA data center. If you want to destroy one with grenades you're going to need a literal truck load of grenades.
Really? Maybe read up some more, OC scale mafia groups weren't doing many of the bank raids of the US 1970s / 1980s - in any case these are still well below my bar on what constitutes a "very strong force".
> Also, I think you massively underestimate the sheer size of an IA data center.
You think wrong.
> If you want to destroy one with grenades you're going to need a literal truck load of grenades.
Exactly right, or rather several drums of farm grade fertiliser, diesel, ball bearings, a stolen truck, and somebody (or two) prepared to do a ram raid. Groomed idealogues or addicts with debt have all been used for such things.
Or, as already mentioned, drive parallel and mortar the centre from one end to the other, achievable by small discontent militia types (who abound in the US).
Serious question time: Are you honestly unaware of Timothy McVeigh? Would you describe him as "a very strong force"?
If it's too expensive to outsource to another country, it's definitely too expensive to put in space instead.
Then there's the power grid problem.
I understand expanding the grid takes a long time, thus the gas turbines. Which I understand are also supply-constrained, and environmentalists are not happy either.
I'm no scientist or financial analyst, but I could imagine that the space thing would be viable especially in a scenario where AI capabilities continue to grow.
If AI really does replace not only most knowledge work but also other labor via robotics, and this requires enormous compute, we are going to want to scale this up at a much faster rate.
Preferably without covering a tenth of the planet with gas generators.
Unless economic systems around the world change significantly very soon, this AI replacement you so cavalierly mention would cause significant portion of human population to reach poverty, causing much unrest and mass deaths.
I don't buy into demonizing the rich, including Altman, Amodei, Musk and co.
I am not concerned that this will be the outcome of the productivity surge.
We will have enough for everyone, and ensuring comfortable living standards for the general population is going to be in the interest of those in power, even if you assume very selfish motivations.
I'd also like to point out that both Anthropic and OpenAI created frameworks to monitor labor market impact and propose responses.
Admittedly I know very little about spaceships
All flavors of Govt (authoritarian/democratic) are bending over backwards to build new DCs.
In Ulanqab, China buildout of data centers 1000x size of Colossus: https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/2099319829589295197
India, a country which has neither power nor water or any measurable infrastructure is giving massive subsidies to hyperscalers to build AI DCs. They get free land (very very costly), nearly free energy, guaranteed supply of water and so on ...
Examples of one authoritarian govt and one democratic govt. And there are 180+ other countries.
Cooling is a major factor. Ulanqab's average temperature is about 4.3°C, enabling free air cooling nearly 10 months a year and very low PUE around 1.1.
Even more decisive is cheap, abundant power—largely wind and solar plus coal—at roughly half the price of eastern China. Add vast open land, dedicated low-latency fiber to Beijing (~2-5 ms),
Honestly, India might be more democratic than China, but the current govt is known for it's authoritarian bent [1] and crony capitalism [2] in particular.
While governments of all types rushed to embrace AI data centers, perhaps driven by fears of being left out, the pushback against data centers seems to be universal. The difference is, countries with less authoritarian govenrments are seeing those pushbacks be generally more successful.
[1] The Chief Election Commissioner was recently caught manipulating voter rolls over the written objections of the other two election commissioners. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqkgw68yjg29o
[2] The transport minister came under flak after pushing a rushed transition to higher ethanol fuel blends. It transpired that his sons just happened to have set up ethanol factories just before the policy was announced and their net worth went up by 5000%. https://www.bhaskarenglish.in/originals/news/whye20-fuel-put...
Can also just be an asymmetric bet - relatively small outlay with low chance of working, but massive upside if it does, such that it's still positive expected value.
But mostly, I think all these armchair quarterbacks should not have very strong opinions about something that they almost certainly don't know much about compared to the people who build these. The person I responded to cited a random blog that ran some numbers, and includes such gems as "In space, a broken fan or a fried motherboard is a crisis." Just... lol
I guess no one dares calling out that the emperor is naked.
Getting it up there and unfolding is an engineering problem, but if you have about 5 times the height as the width of your solar facing front it’s just a matter of moving heat around internally
All solvable, but all difficult and unexpected problems which make everything about operating in space difficult.
And probably the biggest one: absolutely no possibility of service or cheap replacement (sure you don't repair a computer on earth, but you don't need a rocket launch to put a new rack in).
Also you have to pay for them to be launched, which isn't cheap even if you're SpaceX.
And somehow most of the replies seem to be about terrorism. What a comment section.
I'd expect the discussion to be a bit more focused on the scalability and solar power..
Cooling in space is a solved problem for these designs, by construction. They start with existing, flight-proven systems that handle some N KW of heat rejection in space, and shape they payload to require less than N KW of heat, meaning they can technically use existing design as platform and swap out the payload (there is devil in the details around integration here).
That's why there's little weight in papers about this, and they instead focus on actually novel challenges (like operating ML hardware in high-radiation environments).
But yes, I too expected the discussion to be more substantial. As it is, we have a rehash from discussion on that "ML in space" paper from ~6 months ago, which solved thermals by construction and explained how this makes economic sense, and people 100% ignored that, and all comments were a mix of "it makes no economic sense" and "have they thought about how to cool it?".
*sigh*
> Can we deploy a shitload of computers
That's the "is it economical?" question, and to spoil the answer, "with the way launch prices have been dropping in last few years, yes".
(Also the larger question of "relative to datacenters on the ground" is answered by "yes, if you want clean power for it" - turns out moving compute up is more economical than beaming power from space, and costs down here are becoming dominated by land price anyway.)
> in space that are running extremely compute intensive tasks on a continuous basis?
"Extremely compute intensive tasks" is just elaborate and overspecific way of saying "requires N KW of power".
There is nothing magical about compute here, power is power - it doesn't matter whether you spend it on ML, or collecting photons and radioing them back to Earth, or broadcasting a high-precision clock. You need some N KW to run = you need to collect that much, and you need to reject that much of it as heat[0].
--
[0] - That + whatever extra heat you absorb from the Sun.
It's one thing to vandalize some cameras or a driverless car in your neighborhood.
Traveling to a large, potentially secured facility to commit terrorism is on another level.
It being inside a building it is also much more difficult to damage and the consequences would be far greater.
I'd think one would need strong motivations for such actions.
A protest seems much more realistic, but I did not even hear of protests at data centers yet, only a small one at OpenAI headquarters.
https://www.reuters.com/world/poland-suspects-fire-starlink-...
Nope. Depending on the number of satellites in the constellation, it could be very hard or impossible. Russia has only so many orbital-class interceptors.
So are container ships in international waters. Put them there.
People are how and why things work at all. Wealth hoarders obsessively try to eliminate "the human element" because people are also going to turn on you when you mistreat them long enough. Given that we're already talking about space-based data centers, economic efficiency has long gone out the window as a justification for the "need" to remove humans from the equation.
The problem is that try as they might, you can't have it both ways: society requires people cooperating in order to maintain the systems they take for granted but at the same time they do everything to disrupt cooperation and to isolate themselves from people because people have every reason to hate their guts.
It's the ultimate "anarcho-capitalist" folly: in order to enforce a vastly disproportionate property claim (i.e. significantly more than your "fair share" by many orders of magnitude) you need to be able to maintain a vastly disproportionate threat of violence (i.e. significantly more than you could physically deal out yourself by many orders of magnitude) but at this kind of scale the only way to do so requires you to rely on other people (because at some point even carrying around a nuclear warhead with a dead man switch would no longer be a sufficient deterrent) - states exist to solve exactly this problem (among other things) but they still rely on people cooperating. Even "transhumanism" doesn't solve the problem unless you go the Peter Thiel route and see the end of all human life as a possibly necessary part of the process.
EDIT: To pivot back on-topic: guys with guns may not be an acceptable part of the solution for some companies but they can very much be part of the problem. And considering what Iran and the Houthis (or Ukraine for that matter) have been demonstrating, sometimes even guys with very basic explosives and consumer grade electronics can be enough.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3m4z9CoXEY
So unless those pirates have their own space program, it's pretty safe up there.
They appear to be trivially damaged by ships "accidentally" dragging their anchor.
Where does this happen, besides the Gulf of Aden off the Somali coast?
One thing that gives me some small level of comfort is that the billionaires who have the means to make that sort of thing happen don't want to live in bunkers or a radioactive wasteland afterwards. They have it pretty good on Earth as it is now. So there's only so bad things can get (I hope).
To your point, it does feel like we are bouldering towards major disruption, even the unravelling of the fabric of society, thanks to worsening inequality as well as the impacts of AI. In the coming decades we may well have a billion climate refugees. We may have large swathes of the population who have no productive outlet in a world that still requires you to have a job to live. And that could go south very, very quickly.
So I guess my point is that if things get so bad you need to put your AI DC in space to avoid the unwashed masses burning it down, I suspect we'll have far bigger problems long before that becomes an issue.
Look at our present woes in the Middle East. We have two nuclear powers who are dragging the world towards economic collapse. I believe that before we reach that economic doomsday scenario or anyone seriously considers deploying nuclear weapons, the money behind those powers will oust those who try to push us past the brink.
To this point, I believe there's a very real possibility that Trump gets 25A'ed next year, meaning the 25th Amendment is invoked to remove him from office.
it does not see the sun half of the time
polar orbits don't come to the rescue, they are quite busy already
From TFA:
> In low Earth orbit, satellites can access near-constant sunlight, generating up to eight times more solar power than on Earth.
That's obviously a reference to sun-synchronous orbit. You don't get 8 times more solar power in a low inclination orbit.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-confirms-weapons-in-space-ch...
You enforce laws the same way you do otherwise: if they are in your jurisdiction and don't comply, you arrest them; if they're in a jursdiction you're friendly with you ask for extradition; if they're in a jurisdiction you're not friendly with and you really need them to cease whatever they ceasen't, you have them accidentally fall out of a high enough window.
You can't shut down a DC in space. But even if someone has moved their DC into space, their terrestial human body is still very easily shut down one way or another. And maybe less gruesomely, so is whatever comms infrastructure they need to maintain in order to actually connect to that DC - if the DC is sufficiently "out of reach" (i.e. not in low Earth orbit) it likely requires optical transmission if it can accomplish any data rate high enough to allow it to be used for something sufficiently annoying and optics are fickle and require careful calibration.
But seriously, us tech nerds routinely underestimate rubber hose cryptoanalyis (cf. XKCD 538). If you can bypass government regulation it's because the government isn't sufficiently interested in making you stop whatever it is you think you need to bypass their regulations to do. If your goal with operating a DC in space is to evade the "regulatory arbitrage", you're literally advertising your intent to operate what will most likely be a criminal enterprise so unless you have sufficient financial resources to exert political leverage in your favor (cf. Musk), you're just asking for trouble.
We're talking about an exceptionally vulnerable target with a perfectly predictable path of travel here. And it's constantly emitting lots of RF making it easy to track. You just have to get near it and explode with shrapnel.
Totally illegal, of course. But it will be within the reach of millions of people if they want to do it.
I don't think "just move to space bro" is going to stop the pitchfork-mob.
Not trivial but not impossible. If you’ve got a few hundred million people with nothing better to do, I’m sure a few dozen/hundred could pull it off.
It's not like people actually need satellites. We already have ground-based communication in the form of mobile phone networks etc., so I don't think the harm of making LEO unusable would be very great.
The general attitude in this thread against reasonable people not wanting unsustainable megaliths that produce horrible amounts of noise, and are driving up electricity prices, in their communities without any input from said community is astonishing.
HN has really gone full AI derangement syndrome (it runs both directions).
Sending unguided rockets in the general direction of the enemy with 25% failure rate doesn't scale well to a 3-stage precision guided delivery vehicle.
And say you do build an orbital class rocket and manage to launch it without anyone noticing before you do - how many of e.g. Starlink’s 11,000 satellites will you be able to damage? What real impact will that have on Starlink?
It's much easier to wreck shit than transport it safely.
Taking away work was exactly the premise it was sold under.
No one promised any utopia of any sort. The only promise was that AI would put people out of work. The rest is just some naive Star Trek bullshit that was never on the table.
Pretty sure all it's being promoted for is that it will make ~10 people richer than any human being in history.
Well, this part ain't coming without a revolution.
Real basic income will be a lot less like Star Trek and a lot more like The Expanse.
Also, revolutions are rarely ever started by the lower class. They're always started by the middle tier of society, enraging those helpful idiots lower than them to attack those above them. They end up with many dead and many suffering. Those who cry out for revolution have never seen the horrors of war.
> “I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell. … You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don’t know what you’re talking about. War is a terrible thing! … War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”
-William T. Sherman
That will never happen and capitalism is pretty creative in creating artificial scarcities.
You are far too naive if you think there is a non-bloody way to basically remove the wall between the classes, and that those in power will not try to do everything they can to keep their wealth and "higher lifestyle".
"What if we had taxed the internet?
"What was once framed as a trivial tax—half a cent to download a photo, or a cent to send 100 emails—would now cost the average American household an estimated $784,000 per year."
Incredible stats from @JaredWalczak"
https://x.com/senatorshoshana/status/2095980044657021352?s=2...