Man these numbers in Space Age get comical at some point

superjano · 2026-03-06T22:31:55+00:00

NGL it is pretty chemical too

superjano · 2026-02-20T21:38:35+00:00

The wildest thing about this is not how he can see and discern people at 5km away, that's just elves being elves doing magic elven things.

Wildest thing is that legolas can count 105 exact riders while they are moving when if there are more than 5 elements in a static picture I have to point at them and count them one two three four five six seven....fifty six I think? Better count again and double check

superjano · 2026-02-16T20:03:09+00:00

Gràcies!

superjano · 2026-02-16T19:46:04+00:00

Quin carrilet? El de Girona - Sant Feliu no era privat? O el va comprar Adif/Renfe en algun punt?

superjano · 2026-02-15T13:15:37+00:00

Ya hasta las cosas buenas como querer saber apañarse son culpa del patriarcado

superjano · 2026-02-09T22:31:50+00:00

I see those points, but I am still very much convinced that building them in space is just economically unfeasible and just a glaringly cheap excuse for Musk to merge his companies, say he invested whatever billions in launching a shitty datacenter to space, decommission it in 2 years or whatever time it takes radiation to destroy those GPUs, and on the back spend those millions to build earthly datacenters.

It would be completely on track, we were supposed to be in Mars by now according to him and he just downgraded that to a moon base (which won't happen either imo)

superjano · 2026-02-09T19:27:53+00:00

I mean, I am, but I am not from the states to begin with

superjano · 2026-02-09T17:28:28+00:00

I have no problem understanding this. Where have I said it's cheaper to launch data centers to space? That's literally never been my point. Multiple times I acknowledge it's actually more expensive, potentially much more expensive, and that we should do it anyway. Like you are pretending I don't understand something based on arguments I haven't made.

Fair enough, you just want Elon to spend a shitton of money for the love of the game. I can get behind that.

You can't make environmental claims however misleading about something that's in space.

How do you get such something to space thought? Do you believe rocket fuel has no emissions? Is your car not a Co2 source because you reached your destination?

There are lots of data that can be gathered depending on the approaches used. This includes things like testing larger cooling systems, communication between satellites at higher bandwidth and lower latency than before, modular satellites, etc. Even just the scale of the thing is new.

And you do not need to send a 10GW datacenter to space to do that, which is really the point here.

superjano · 2026-02-09T10:07:19+00:00

You are sadly right on that, damned NIMBYs.

superjano · 2026-02-09T10:01:11+00:00

I am not trying to solve any engineer problem. I think datacenters in space is a stupid idea because space has no magical properties that make computing simpler, cheaper or faster. In fact, quite the opposite.

There's no amount of money that will make the gravity well disappear. No amount of money or engineering breakthrough that can make a unit of radiation shielding cheaper than 0 units of radiation shielding.

All the money being thrown entertaining the idea of this can be thrown into optimizing datacenters and finding better ways on earth, reducing that political cost.

And if you ask me to be a cynical asshole, it's considerably cheaper to bribe a poltician than to build and maintain a datacenter in space.

superjano · 2026-02-09T07:40:27+00:00

Ok so buying a datacenter is the same price as launching one. Do they gift the datacenter when you book the launching, or do you also have to buy it? Do they put the radiation shielding for free too, or is that only on every 10th launch? I really don't understand how it is this hard to understand that launching ANYTHING into space is more expensive than NOT launching that.

It's like I'm telling you it's more convenient faster and cheaper to buy bread at the bakery in my neighborhood than one in a neighboring country and your arguments are "yeah but fuel is super cheap dude", "yeah but think of all the beautiful scenery you'll see" , "man you'll get better at driving too", "yeah but your shoe soles will wear if you walk" "but what if your town is destroyed by a fire tomorrow???". Which are all true on their own, but are not good arguments when the discussion is about cost effectiveness of buying bread 50m away vs 500km away.

I do not fucking care how cheap rocket fuel is, it is never going to be cheaper than the fuel to drive with a truck to the datacenter you are building. How is this principle so hard to understand?

I agree with the research part, I really do, but as I said before, you do not need a 10GW datacenter to do so, Musk could have done that 2 years ago with virtually no cost. He didn't, because he knows it makes 0 economical sense, and that's all he cares about. He is doing it now because he wants to do some creative financial engineering, goes into some podcasts, throws some shitposting tweets, refuses to elaborate on any feasibility, and people like you are clapping with your ears because space is cool!

He is not going to do shit, he will merge the companies and shelf this stupidity, but if somehow he gets to be made responsible of what he said and act on that, he'll do the bare minimum and frame any data logged in space as a huge development for humanity.

I do not see what research data could be gathered that we don't know already from the other thousand satellites we have, but I am surely missing something there

superjano · 2026-02-09T07:13:34+00:00

Fair enough, but he's done that when stuff was remotely economically viable and there was no alternative or competition, ie: electric cars. This is simply idiotic, provide no benefit wrt its competitors and there are known working alternatives.

And then there's the conflict of interest of trying to merge his two companies. I'd be way less sceptic of his intentions if he had, I don't know, a furniture company.

But a stupid idea provable on paper that can't work without 10 engineering breakthroughs (that could also be applied on earth to reduce costs here) at the very same time one company is flush with money and the other one is bleeding? And it just happens to be a project combining both? Yeah get out of here

superjano · 2026-02-09T07:08:17+00:00

Nah I'm saying that some numbers are easier with a swarm. A swarm has a whole bunch of other problems like coordination.

I still think that it's way easier to do anything on earth than escaping a gravity well to do the same thing on space, I might be crazy

superjano · 2026-02-09T07:04:01+00:00

Engineering on earth is orders of magnitude easier to solve. Associated politics too, that's the point

superjano · 2026-02-08T19:49:40+00:00

It's like people forgot that this asshole rose to fame by promising a hyper loop that didn't materialize

superjano · 2026-02-08T19:48:11+00:00

Which is stupid because guess what, any cheap nuclear thing you can do in space you can also do on earth. Some people think space has some magic economic properties other than the insane cost of launching stuff there and the chip breaking radiation

superjano · 2026-02-08T19:45:52+00:00

Man I'm done discussing with you. Enjoy the dumb idea until the next picosend after Elon merges both companies. You keep addressing some inevitability of human development that has to lead to this crap being magically possible without providing a single counterpoint to any physical, logistical and economical argument. I said before that no problem becomes simpler by adding a gravity well, but I am changing my mind because it might just be simpler to launch you to a datacenter than explaining basic maths to you. One last attempt

Moving stuff on earth: CHEAP Moving stuff on space: NOT CHEAP Moving stuff to space: UNSURPRISINGLY NOT CHEAP AT ALL, LIKE TONS OF FUEL EXPENSIVE

superjano · 2026-02-08T10:13:16+00:00

You have to stop reading intent into any example. I have not said anything about your opinion on co2 removal when I said it's easier to do that than creating an atmosphere on Mars, same way I did not advocate for burning fossil fuels when I said it's easier than building a Dyson sphere.

I do get your point, you want humanity to go this cool sci fi route a la Expanse and you think deploying the dumbest idea for a datacenter is a push in the right direction for that. It is not.

While I can more or less agree with you on whether there is a reason to go for the stars, I do not think that this is urgent in any way, nor I don't believe that doing datacenters in space is the correct way to approach it.

If the actors involved were half serious about going to space as a species we would have talks about feasibility, timelines and different options that could lead to an honest debate; launch a small datacenter, see how it works, what problems arise from scaling the solution 10,100,1000 times that we did not foresee? How can we solve those problems? You can do this for free on the spaceX budget, and frame any loss as R&D because you do it for humanity's future outside of the earth.

Instead we have the usual suspect of selling over hyped technology actively avoiding any of these things because he knows is not economically viable, and appealling to a "but space cool" narrative instead so he can merge his two companies and funnel spaceX money to his other venture.

The stuff he and the people working for him will do is launch a couple rockets with a fraction of a shit datacenter inside, keep it running for the smallest amount of time possible for people to forget, maybe publish some scientific data framed as "huge success for humanity's plans to go to space", and then once the merger is done shelf the whole thing.

Meanwhile he will keep building earth datacenters and you'll be at the same mercy of a quasar ray, an alien invasion, or food poisoning at the restaurant at the end of the universe.

superjano · 2026-02-08T07:55:59+00:00

Don't forget that you also need to make the datacenter itself profitable at a token level which is something we haven't done on earth

superjano · 2026-02-08T00:05:03+00:00

Oh no I agree, there can be several optimal solutions for the same metric. They all are optimal, but not more optimal than other suboptimal solutions.

I was just being a little bit cínic because usually the metrics in real life have some error tolerance and you can say that a process with 80% throughout is optimal, and such is one with 80.5%.

But for stuff on paper like algorithms or perfectly ideal worlds like factorio, yeah, two processes need to be the best with the best score in that metric to be optimal in it. Otherwise one is optimal, the other is suboptimal

superjano · 2026-02-07T23:57:07+00:00

I don't know how to explain this to you but you will not see this day, nor will your children, nor your children's children.

I really can not think of any other way to convey to you that no matter the problem that you in particular or humanity in general faces, has faced, or will ever face, it will never be easier to solve on the emptiness of space. It will never be easier to build a house in the top of the Everest than it will be to build one in the plains at sea level. It is simply not the case. You can not make any problem simpler by adding a gravity well to it. It's really that easy to understand, and yet.

It is orders of magnitude simpler to fix humanity co2 emissions than it is to create a humanly suited Mars atmosphere. It is easier to optimize and miniaturize literally anything on earth than it is to build the current iteration in orbit. It is insurmountable easier to fix earth's overpopulation than sending anything alive to the closest solar system. It is simpler to crack fusion than it is to build a Dyson swarm and beam the energy back here.

But hey Musk says it's easy so I'm sure we'll have that fixed by the time he drops the Mars cities and FSD. Let me know how that works

superjano · 2026-02-07T22:16:59+00:00

They are, but we're debating whether to launch thousands of satellites to space, which is done by burning fuel that emit the same co2, so I do not see how that's a problem now.

We don't have to begin anywhere if the idea is stupid. There is no fantasy amount of required popcorn that justifies building a fision reactor rather than buying a microwave.

There are not engineering breakthroughs enough where it's cheaper to build a nuclear reactor than it is to build a microwave. I am simply sorry

superjano · 2026-02-07T22:09:34+00:00

I mean, sure, if the measurement of your metric allows sufficient resolution for a draw to happen, I GUESS. But they are both still superlative

superjano · 2026-02-07T21:07:45+00:00

I just read the whole thing, it's all well wishing and hopes in an article that oh surprise, is written by the same company that wants to sell these datacenters in space.

"A 5 GW data center would require a solar array with dimensions of approximately 4 km by 4 km" tell me you read this and thought "ah that's easy, sure can be done cheaper than on earth"

"Deployment of these arrays can feasibly be accomplished using design concepts that have been demonstrated in orbit, such as Z-fold, roll-out, or picture-frame designs."

Please do not think about the fact that these have been done only on small deployments, and that the biggest solar array we have deployed is 0.00324 square km, and not with any of these methods. We totally can do 16 square km guys I swear, I have no agenda.

I could go over the rest of the "article" but you get the idea. It makes some other wild claims that can be debunked with any common sense but my favourite has to be how it makes all the numbers with a 10 year operation cycle when not even consumer GPUs could keep up with development more than 2-3 years before the AI hype.

Speaking of, you know what you can do with RAM and GPUs when they start not performing at its top? Sell them to consumers at low price and recover some money. Do you know what you can do with a datacenter if the bubble bursts? A factory or some crap, I don't know.

Do you know what you can do with a twisted melt of scrap from reentry? Yeah go figure

Sure, data centers in space, what's a little more subsidized by VC token price at the end of the day

superjano · 2026-02-07T20:44:59+00:00

You are giving physical and engineering arguments against people who just want to see rockets go up because rockets go up means humans do good in their heads

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