this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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[–] SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)

At least their water consumption would do down. Let's do it, shoot the tech bros up there with them. Let's even overshoot the orbit and make them disappear in the darkness.

[–] yesman@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Water consumption has been way overblown. Sure if you're in the Colorado River basin, water is absolutely an issue. But if your concerned with wasted water usage, all data centers combined would be a rounding error compared to what we throw away on turf grass.

Kyle Hill and Hank Green have both made videos about this I'm not crazy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wx7ToT0G0qo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc

[–] REDACTED@infosec.pub 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

I'll watch these after work, but surely the problem is not availability of water, but drinking water, which is another story? Data centers aim for clean water sources which can be used for drinking. Turf grass don't need that which makes the comparison seem unfair

[–] hobovision@mander.xyz 2 points 20 hours ago

I live in California and am required to water a lawn as a renter with my drinking water. Turf grass may not need drinking water, but I'd guess the portion of water used for grass that is recycled is not particularly high.

You may also be surprised about what makes water "drinking water". There's a water project in San Diego that is aiming to close the water loop by purifying all wastewater using RO and UV, to the point that it is lab-quality pure water. It's illegal to add minerals to it and pump it into the municipal water supply. They have to discharge it into a river first and let it have a certain "residence time" in an open air reservoir. The water we drink here isn't much more than lake water, and far less clean than the water that can be made by recycling wastewater.

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[–] oxysis@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

No let’s not do that. Building these slopstations will only contribute to the build up of space debris. Making it harder for future generations to have access to the stars. Just shoot them into a mountain side, or the ocean floor instead. Far more economical too.

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[–] beep@piefed.world 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

The article you posted from Futurism(Via Yahoo News) reference a YouTube video as it's source which is in itself is a follow up to IEEE Spectrum article.

I believe watching the original video or reading the actual article will provide a better value.

That or they read Neuromancer and came away with all the wrong lessons in their head.

[–] anon_8675309@lemmy.world 1 points 20 hours ago

When you have a trillion dollars the solar system is your playground.

[–] suff@piefed.social 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Like with Starlink, it's all about orbital dominance.

If Starcloud is about data storage out reach of terrestrial events (attacks and desasters), then it's irrelevant whether the performance can compete with terrestrial systems. In fact the paper neither mentions flops or bytes.

Looking at starlink, it must be possible to run at least some computational power in space.

[–] village604@adultswim.fan 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The biggest issue is heat dissapation. A satellite that relays a signal requires orders of magnitude less compute power than an AI datacenter.

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[–] nicpicname@lemmy.zip 0 points 15 hours ago

God almighty

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 4 points 1 day ago

Well there's a headline that's going to have a lot of sane comments under it.

[–] FE80@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

VCs are so dumb and insane they deserve whatever happens to them. Data centers in space...sure...go for it...prove the naysayers wrong.

[–] FoxtrotDeltaTango@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

At this point, just build the data centers on another planet or on another moon

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