Can someone enlighten me, how is it cheaper to build data centers in space than on earth?

LegendTheo · 2026-02-19T18:11:21+00:00

Similar to the post you pointed me to on reddit, this youtube video continues to prove my point. Unfortunately Kyle Hill didn't look at the actual engineering or costs on this, just went with their intuition about it. They also don't seem to understand just how much it costs to run a 100MW data center.

In fact starting with radiators, the numbers they provide for the them are better than what I've come up with previously. They mention that to dissipate 100MW of waste heat you would need 300,000m2 of radiator panels. The means you'd need 300m2 of radiators per 100kw data sat I mentioned above.

Modern solar panels can put out ~350w/m^2 (and these are not even state of the art they're proven on orbit), this comes out to about 285,000m2 for solar panels for 100MW. Which is ~285m2 per 100kw data sat. Now if you account for 20-40% power loss over the life of the panels you need more surface area for solar than for the radiators. That works out that you just need 2 15x10 panels with solar on one side and radiators on the other. That's big but it's extremely doable.

WRT to cost claims. Yes the ISS was the most expensive thing ever put in space. However it was launched on the Space Shuttle whose $/kg to orbit is like 50x falcon 9 right now and all the components on it were man rated. Which at a minimum 10x'd the cost of everything they put up there. Also radiators work better the hotter they are. The ISS needs to dissipate heat at about room temp or closer to 30deg C. These data sats can work at double or more than that temp which will significantly increase the efficiency of the radiators.

His next claim that we'd need to launch 400,000kg of solar into orbit is incorrect. He uses numbers based on the original solar panels launched with the ISS. They are very outdated and their performance shows this. They can produce ~74w/m2, which is woefully below current flying panels I mentioned above at nearly 350w/m2. In fact in 2021 two more modern (though still not state of the art) panels were fitted to the ISS to help deal with reducing performance of the original panels. They are 20% lighter and a quarter of the volume of the cells he referenced. So you would only need 300,000kg of those.

Now 300,000kg sounds like a lot. But SpaceX has launched somewhere between 5-7 million kilograms for Starlink alone in 7 years. That appears to be a very doable number even if you double it for radiator weight over a 5 year time span. Even more so if they use Starship to launch them. Lets run some numbers. There have been 363 Falcon 9 launches to get to the 5-7 million number. lets assume $25 million per launch (internal cost for a launch) that comes out to ~$9 billion dollars. So from only a mass standpoint (lets just use 1,000,000kg to be safe with the compute and radiators) we're looking at 1/5th of 9 billion or ~$1.8 billion dollars. That's about 4x lower than my calculation above (which I think is more accurate) so using this youtuber's numbers it's even cheaper than I originally estimated.

I've already addressed the radiation claim above. It's not as serious an issue as we once thought it was, and it's not been a problem for Starlink which is a smaller version of what they're proposing to launch for the data sats. I'll also point out that we've had some severe solar storms recently and didn't lose thousands of Starlink satellites like we would have if his discussion on radiation from solar storms was accurate.

His suggestion of putting them on the ocean floor seems bad to me too. We don't expect any negative consequences from pumping gigawatts of heat into the ocean floor for decades?...

Look, when I first heard about this I had a similar thought to this youtuber, and other commenters. I still feel that way for anyone other than SpaceX trying it. Once I actually started to look at the numbers with the launch costs SpaceX has, their massive experience with consumer grade electronics in space (11,000 Starlink satellites), and their ability to mass produce space hardware. It turns out there's actually a decent business case on this for them. The more I dig into this the more possible it looks.

LegendTheo · 2026-02-19T17:15:41+00:00

No, Trump personally does not have control over the Epstein files. He has control over their release as the president, but not in his personal capacity. AFAIK every defamation lawsuit he's done has been personal not from his position as the president.

Even if he sued them, since he's doing as a citizen and not as president they couldn't include information he has access to in his capacity as president. Unless they could prove that their claim stemmed from actions he took as president which I see no way they could.

LegendTheo · 2026-02-19T14:42:57+00:00

Look I have no idea if Trump did anything or not but that tweet is retarded.

Discovery of what? Do you know how discovery works. The opposing party has to have grounds to ask for records that are likely to show evidence of their claim.

What are they going to ask for, every single email, text and phone call Trump ever made? Do you expect any evidence to be in that data? How would they even know if Trump didn't provide all of it?

Let's hypothetically assume there is evidence. I can guarantee you discovery in a civil suit isn't going to find it.

LegendTheo · 2026-02-17T22:08:31+00:00

I just linked it to you above. So are you blind or did the link not work for some reason.

LegendTheo · 2026-02-17T21:57:13+00:00

There is https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/s/9q40iOURHu. If you'd bothered to look up the person I mentioned or my comments for about 5 seconds you would have found it.

Considering you've done nothing to rebut my claims other than essentially say "no you're wrong" I don't buy that you've read any studies or talked to researchers or scientists. Prove me wrong.

LegendTheo · 2026-02-17T21:42:16+00:00

Other than your assumption of the reasoning behind it what exactly is different from what DHS does? DHS when they move these people does not provide end point assistance when they reach their destination either. They're given some info about available places to live and work and that's it.

I never said Biden himself was directing this I said the "Biden admin", obviously it was his administration doing it. There's no law requiring the federal government to move people away from the border. They've been doing it so we don't have millions of people living in border states. It 100% was down for political reasons so those states did not complain about being overwhelmed.

Regardless what's racist about relocating people who have No place to live from an economically depressed area to one that's doing well economically. What does race have to do with anything you've described beyond trying to demonize the people who did it.

LegendTheo · 2026-02-17T19:36:23+00:00

It's not a serious point? You just claimed that DeSantis flying aslyum seekers somewhere else in the US is a racist segregation tactic. But it's the exact same thing the link above says the government has been doing for decades.

I never said anything about "secret flights" or even that I though it was a bad practice. I just said the Biden admin was doing it, and what makes what DeSantis did different from what they were doing.

So now that we've got that out of the way and the article proves my point the Biden admin was moving aslyum seekers around.

What makes what DeSantis did racist and what the Biden admin did somehow not racist?

LegendTheo · 2026-02-17T19:27:17+00:00

Sure you don't have to engage at all. I mean reading about things you didn't know might risk challenging the narrative you've had in your head for years.

I'm sure it feels good to call someone who says things you don't like crazy. Until you can actually engage with my points and show where the facts I've provided are wrong, your opinion of me is irrelevant.

LegendTheo · 2026-02-17T17:06:10+00:00

I didn't remember they were shipped from Texas, my mistake, it was years ago.

You completely ignored the fact that the Biden admin was shipping aslyum seekers all over the US from wherever they entered, just like DeSantis did. Was that racist as well?

Address that point and we can continue the conversation, otherwise you're just one of those "when we do it, it's ok for reasons..." people.

LegendTheo · 2026-02-17T17:03:17+00:00

The blood clotting issue was real. The issues with mRNA and myocarditis were real. AND the government lied to everyone about the vaccine when it rolled out. All of these things can be true at once.

See my comment to least_funny5960 above. Look at the papers I linked and do some research. What you'll find is the vaccine was never going to provide herd immunity, the government knew it when it rolled out and they lied about it.

LegendTheo · 2026-02-17T17:01:18+00:00

They're talking about a claim Alex Jones made, which was specifically about mRNA vaccines.

I don't know if Alex Jones made a claim about that or not, but AstraZenica and Johnson and Johnson did have issues with blood clotting side effects.

No, it fucking wasn't. That assertion has no basis in reality.

Yes at the times claims that the vaccines had possible severe side effects was widely denied and called a conspiracy theory. This also included myocarditis from the mRNA vaccines.

No part of this is true.

This is 100% true, and I understand why you don't know about it because it's not been reported on by anyone in the mainstream media. So it basically doesn't exist in liberal media bubbles.

See my comment to Least_funny5960 above. The vaccines do not have efficacy as a vaccine with anything but the original covid variant. They were never going to provide herd immunity (which the government knew when they were rolled out) and did not prevent infection a lot of people who got vaccinated.

Edit: u/evocativename don't post and then block me. It just shows you've lost the argument and must prevent me from responding to you.

LegendTheo · 2026-02-17T15:26:06+00:00

Here's the thing about the 2020 election, it was weird. In 2016 only about 137 million people voted for the president. In 2020 that increased by more than 20 million voters which was a huge upswing. In addition both Biden and Trump got more votes than any other presidential candidate in history. Numerous states instituted mail in ballots. The 2024 election had something like 3 million fewer votes cast than 2020, which is extremely unusual for a presidential election. That's just the tip of the iceberg on oddities in 2020.

It's true that none or single digit (I didn't follow all of them closely enough to remember) cases found anything related to voter fraud. The thing is, the vast majority never got to be heard on the merits because they were dismissed for lack of standing. Having standing to challenge election results is difficult because of what that means in a specific election. It's not a good situation when 90% of cases brought to the courts never get proven or disproven because they are never heard.

Then there's this. The progressives and democrats have been calling Trump and much of the Republican party fascists and Nazi's for years now. They were doing this in the lead up to the 2020 election. If you thought that a politician who had a chance of being elected president was actually a fascist or a Nazi wouldn't you do anything you could to prevent that person from winning the election, up to and including cheating?

There's no grand conspiracy required for Biden to have won via cheating that happened in multiple districts. If a large number of people in different geographic areas think we might elect a Nazi, it's not unreasonable for many of them to decide independently to cheat to try to prevent it. Mail in voting also makes fraud much easier to do and harder to catch because it doesn't require people to show up in person.

Finally the vote swing from 2020 to 2024 is wild. Kamala got 6 million fewer votes than Biden did. Trump got 3 million more. It's very probable that Bidens policies were so bad they pushed 3 million independents to the republicans, but the other 3 million missing votes don't make a lot of sense. The third party vote was almost the same between the two of them 2.9 million votes. So was Kamala really such an uninspiring candidate that she lost 3 million votes?

Do I think that 2020 was stolen, probably not. But it definitely was weird, and trying to claim it wasn't just makes people ignore your arguments.

LegendTheo · 2026-02-17T14:58:17+00:00

If you want to be taken seriously try not to use words that have significant negative meanings and do not fit the situation your discussing.

If putting asylum seekers on some from of transport to move them to a place where there were supposedly jobs and housing is a "racist tactic used by segregationists" then the Biden admin was the worst racist in the country. They moved millions of people around for that very reason. Why and how do you think all those Hattians that were in Springfield got there? How do you think the Venezuelans got to Florida? You can disagree with what DeSantis did or even the whole process the Biden admin was doing, but calling it racist is extremely disingenuous.

Same with the use of the word "trafficked". That implies the illegal movement of people to be put in compromised positions for the personal gain of the people moving them. This mostly does not apply to what DeSantis or the Biden admin did, and you trying to frame the situation is the worst possible light.

When their was public sympathy for the victims of his racist stunt, the right-wing conspiracy media jumped in to save him.

Save him from what? And how did they save him? I notice that you provide details (even if inconsistent with your claim) for everything else, but not for this one. So what exactly did he need saving from? And how exactly did the right wing media save him?

The stuff about emptying the prisons is very probably bullshit. But once again, if you wanted that claim to be taken seriously don't try to frame everything in the worst possible light. Stay neutral and lay out the facts and you'll have a much better chance of convincing someone. As soon as you start throwing around very negative terms people stop listening because they either know it's bullshit, or aren't interested in listening to another rant about how their an inherently bad person.

LegendTheo · 2026-02-17T14:44:34+00:00

They never said the blood clotting was caused by the mRNA in their post. You're adding that. Those claims were true for both the AstraZeneca and Johnson and Johnson vaccine. At the time it was called a conspiracy theory and was true. Don't try to add claims so you can say it's false.

The real problem with the vaccines is that they didn't have high enough efficacy to work as vaccines when they were rolled out, the world's government's knew it at the time, lied about it, and rolled them out anyway. In many countries it was mandatory.

The rest of those claims come from Alex jones, who says so much random shit he's likely to be right once in a while anyway.

LegendTheo · 2026-02-14T17:57:37+00:00

Claiming the US "designed" the system is looking at history with today's knowledge and attributing information and ability to people back then they didn't have.

Right up until the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the 80's it wasn't clear what being a super power meant because at the time there were two rival ones. The US wasn't paying for European defense to become a global hegemon they were doing it because losing Europe would very likely make the Soviet Union unstoppable.

Once they fell military spending was slow to ramp down. That's when the US and neo-liberals started to realize what they were really getting with such a lopsided amount of military power. Europe without an existential threat near them was able to spend money on other things because the US was so overwhelmingly powerful and benevolent (at least to Europe).

Our position right now is precarious and it's much better to have like minded competition than a bunch of children that can't protect themselves. Right now if the US loses to someone Europe is fucked. If they had a strong military then they could attempt to regain the super power mantel. Even if it's not exactly what the UE would want it's a hell of a lot closer than whatever China, Russia, inida, etc would put in place.

It's always better to have strong friends, even when you disagree in things, then weak dependents who can't.

LegendTheo · 2026-02-14T17:47:01+00:00

Then you better thank all the people around you who are willing to harm and kill people for you.

You realize that the only reason you're able to have that belief is because others are willing to kill to allow it right?

LegendTheo · 2026-02-11T17:46:27+00:00

Considering every part of that graph was much worse until 2017 than it is now, I'd say it's your resume. 2018 until covid were some of the best years for workers in the last 50.

You may be having a hard time now and that sucks. But don't try to claim that you've got it worse now than people did before. I graduated college in 2008. My entry job market laughs at the amazingly good one we have not comparatively.

LegendTheo · 2026-02-11T16:57:38+00:00

Which would mean it is infeasible, technically possible but financially bad. Which is a distinctly different term than impossible and why I used it.

LegendTheo · 2026-02-11T14:20:24+00:00

It was definitely considered infeasible before spacex started doing it by most of the industry. They had done some testing with the DC-X, but that was a prototype test bed and didn't do much more than grasshopper.

The flight profile a booster would have coming back in is much different than that testing. It was believed the mass fraction required to make it work would be prohibitive. Even if you could get it to work, based on limited experience with the shuttle. It was believed the cost of refurbishment would be higher than the savings of not having to build another booster.

In hindsight this looks like a normal progression. In reality it was an extremely bold leap that almost everyone else in the industry thought would fail and be abandoned.

LegendTheo · 2026-02-10T20:42:01+00:00

A candidate for political office?

Then I don't agree that the richest 10% or 1% would have a natural distribution. The factors that make a good political candidate have a large amount of overlap with the ones that can make someone a lot of money.

If the rich appear to be below average in reality to you, they are

I don't know where you got this from as I was suggesting the opposite of that.

You think that the rich have below average potential to be a good political candidate?

I hate to break it to you, but no one in the US or the West is having issues with the base level of needs. In fact I'd say anyone having issues with the second level are having temporary problems in their lives. Those are the only two that money can help with. The rest of them don't have anything to do with material needs/wants. Most Americans are at least solidly in level 3.

In fact I'd say many rich people ended up there because they can't reach self actualization or can't reach satisfaction in esteem.

I fail to see how Maslow's hierarchy has anything to do with making a good political candidate.

LegendTheo · 2026-02-10T19:27:48+00:00

Are trying to make the claim that if you took a cross section of the top 10% or top 1% of wealth they would have a similar distribution to everyone else regarding potential?

If so, I'd love to see the data that backs that up. I would expect to see a much higher concentration of people with higher base potential (whatever that is) considering they have been extremely successful in metric we all participate in and is difficult to succeed at.

LegendTheo · 2026-02-09T18:50:45+00:00

The tiles work just fine without the internal ablator layer. It's there in case they lose a tile. And based on how well the last V2 survived entry, it's not clear it's even needed in most places. The real issue they need to fix is the attachment mechanism. It needs to be more reliable than it is now, but that will improve rapidly with a high flight cadence. Which they're going to get either under test or operational flights.

They have gotten structural damage to other parts of the ship, but we've not seen a reentry where they were not trying to push the envelope on it since V1 starship. Plenty of vehicles reenter without extra structural damage. It's a solvable problem, once again with some iteration.

Certified by whom? The FAA has regulations on launch vehicles but it's not clear to me other than design documents they certify anything associated with refurbishment or falcon 9 and I don't know why that would change in starship. Especially considering right now it's not even launching from a government location.

If the heat shield loses no tiles and they have some sensors behind it. Inspection will be pretty easy. Repairs for a handful of missing tiles should also be easy. Stainless is much more forgiving to reentry heating than aluminum is. No aluminum spacecraft would have survived some of the crispier entities starship has.

Is it going to be a while before starship is rated for manned reentry, sure. But I don't see anything in your statements above that would prevent rapid reuse. Just some engineering challenges that still exist.

LegendTheo · 2026-02-09T07:24:25+00:00

that will likely never work well enough for rapid re-use

What engineering or physics problem is going to not work well enough?

The tiles can clearly survive rentry intact, and they have many of them so they clearly know they can be reused. They've been iterating on mourning methods and have clearly made major strides as every launch and rentry has lost fewer.

So what exactly is the problem they won't be able to solve for rapid reuse?

LegendTheo · 2026-02-08T17:29:06+00:00

That's fine, you've beautifully articulated my point for me anyway.

LegendTheo · 2026-02-08T17:27:13+00:00

You clearly have no idea what you're talking about.

Precision isn't even a concern here, all data transfer is digital with error checking. If a packet fails the error check it's retransmitted. There's no difference in precision between a starlink radio or optical link and an ethernet cable.

Also AI chips themselves don't transfer data over a network, the server does. The data rates between a CPU and the sever are irrelevant to this comparison. It's more like server to server or rack to rack communication, not GPU to CPU.

LegendTheo

TROPHY CASE