this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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This is what I’ve been tearing my hair out over any time this comes up. If you put a computer in space it will heat up until it achieves incandescence. Which is bad for the performance.
I don't have a good grasp on what technology exists for space, but I would assume that radiators of some sort would be possible. Not in the conventional way that they ineract with a medium to release heat, but instead that the radiators emit heated particles - kind of in the same way that water evaporates without boiling. With that being said, I have no idea what efficiency that would operate under, and I have no idea if such a radiator would be used up fast. It sounds like a terrible idea, but I don't posess the facts.
Some people don't believe in space travel because there is no air to push against in the way that jet engines work. But they fail to understand that space travel operates under other ways to generate force. I just don't want to end up in the same sort of argument as them, believing that it's not possible to cool down machines in space just because there is no medium for conventional cooling.
For an intro to real proven methods you can look up how the cooling for the ISS works. It's quite interesting, but takes a lot of space, for relatively little power.
So is the plan is to use a heat-pump to cool the computers while getting some waste-product as hot as possible, and then eject the waste product? Or perhaps rather than ejecting it, the heat could be put into a large surface-area heat-sink thing to just radiate the energy black-body-style...
I think ideas like this are fair and reasonable if we have to have a data centre in space (for example, if we wanted people to live indefinitely on a space-colony or something like that). But its pretty clear that no plan will ever be anywhere near as good as what we can do on the planet's surface.
Building and operating these things on the Earth's surface is already expensive and resource intensive. And doing it in space is going to be a lot worse.
This kills the ~~crab~~ server.
But apparently still somehow good for The Economy™!