this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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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).