this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
846 points (98.5% liked)
Technology
85921 readers
4264 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No you’re just confident despite your ignorance. Turning waste heat into electromagnetic radiation is not easy or efficient - 100 to 350W per square meter in current space craft. The sheer scale of radiators necessary in a orbital data centre would dwarf the footprint of the servers themselves.
Perhaps you can educate us instead of being mad at the world?
Thanks but I'd like to not read Billy Madison's lecture on thermal dynamics based on magic and fairy dust.
I don't know if you realize this but losing heat by radiating it away is incredibly slow and inefficient.
It does matter because it means it's not a solution.
Never said it was. But if you want a solution NASA figured it out almost 3 quarters of a century ago. If the cooling solution is the thread that makes or breaks the concept sure you could justify being this irrational I guess or you could find the next better reason to be against data centers in space. Upto you.
You sound like you think you're making a point but you're kinda just saying nonsense in the face of this not being viable.
You just need something like ~256,000 m² or like 60% the size of vatican city of radiators to dissipate 1mw power at 300k, I calculated it https://crazypeople.online/post/20952535/9448375
lmao "when scientists and engineers figure out how to do it". You can't just engage in magical thinking and frame it as science, sorry.
You can when it is a hypothetical to make your point.
...No, you can't, because then your point is "maybe one day, space magic will be real!" And that makes you sound like a lobotomite.
"Hypothetically, some magical bullshit could happen contrary to the known laws of physics (not to mention economics), and that would make me right. Bet you didn't think of that huh?"
Win every argument with this high-level lobotomite strategy!
Well, you can't really come up with a novel material to dissipate faster because the math I presented is actually assuming perfect efficiency. If you understood the math you would have noticed the physical constant governing that process. I never came up with any arguments against it, I am just stating a fact that it would take a 100 megawatt data center a 250k ish square meters of radiating surface.
I am against data centers in space for more practical reasons though, space isn't a good environment to really build anything and we are decades or centuries away from doing anything like it. The data transfer won't be ideal via microwave transmissions for many of the things you are going to want to use the data centers for. Getting the material itself to space is far fetched and manufacturing in space requires an entire earth bound supply chain and adding the step of launching into space isn't going to be cost effective at any scale.
Data centers they should be smaller, distributed and hooked up to the L3 fiberoptics network and instead of subsidizing mega corporations we should be educating and empowering people to self host hardware they own and control in their own home to build a distributed cloud. I don't care about data centers in and of themselves or where they are. I care that the capitalist governments are going to squander the capital build out for things I don't like such as surveillance, military industrial tech and bull shit. Since they operate as a get rich quarterly scheme and not a long term asset for man kind, the build outs are going to be where the land use is cheapest and those all happen to be sensitive ecosystems facing other challenges already, otherwise they'd be desirable and expensive.
Black body radiation is a real, but it's an extremely inefficient way to get rid of excess heat. So you'd need huge radiators to get enough surface area.
Add to this the fact that terrestrial data centers operate at a loss, and there's no way to run a space based one profitably.
plus trying to dissipate heat in space, which is mostly a vacumn is a problem too.
"Black body radiation" is the physical process by which you "dissipate" (the correct word here is "radiate") heat in space.
In space you can't just have the heat be passed from the radiator to some "substance" that fills space (like on Earth the heat is passed to air or to water that then gets released to the environment) because almost all of space is empty of matter (not exactly: there's incredibly low density stuff in it, mainly ions, but such low density means pretty much no available mass to sink the heat), so the only way for that heat to leave is the natural physical process of a warm body emitting photons merely because of its temperature (the wavelength of which depends on temperature) which is called Black Body Radiation.
As others have pointed out, it's a way less efficient process that dissipating heat by it being passed from the radiator directly to some substance that's part of the environment (i.e. transmission).
Man, you can't be this pedantic and this incorrect, all at the same time.
The "there is no air in space therefore datacenters in space are a bad idea" crew is not going away. Are you even human?
We got Musk fanboys on Lemmy before GTA 6.
When i did i say anything of that? Are you ok buddy?
Check how many square meters of copper radiators per human you need on ISS and then do the math kwh for a datacenter and you will get more tonnes of material than any material on the hole planet earth and now you understand why it's your idea that's removed from any intelligent discourse.
Or why would I bother educating you. Go and invest in companies building data centers in space, vote for them, idc
Please reconsider your use of the "R" word. It is not harmless. People try to say "it just means stupid" but we all know what people that word refers to. They also know this word, and know it's used in reference to them.
They don't deserve it. My wife, for example, used to teach Shakespeare in theatrical classes in the adult day school she worked at. Her student absolutely were capable of learning that and understanding it fully.
Yeah, language evolves over time. But just as I hope you wouldn't call a Black person "colored" because that term is currently not appreciated (even though it was the preferred in decades past), I hope you would consider removing the "R" word from your vocabulary as well.
They're arguing in favor of AI. They already don't care about other people, unfortunately.