I know we all have the attention span of goldfish now, but remember Theranos, the company founded by a 19-year-old college dropout that claimed to be able to conduct hundreds of medical tests on a single drop of blood? Yeah, it couldn’t do that, because it is physically impossible. You simply need more blood than that.
Plenty of people who did not quit college at 19 could have told you at the time (some of them did) that what Theranos said it could do was preposterous. But most people don’t really have any idea how blood testing actually works, and using a lot less blood sounds like a good idea since nobody particularly likes to get poked with a needle. That was enough to propel Theranos to a $9 billion valuation before it all inevitably collapsed into nothing.
Recently, Elon Musk pitched orbital data centers — that is, putting data centers in space instead of on the ground — as part of his attempt to drive up the stock price of his company SpaceX. This is not working, because public investors in SpaceX are not quite as dumb as the private investors in Theranos were.
There will not be any profitable data centers orbiting around the earth while anyone reading this is still alive. Maybe someday, when we have quantum something something, asteroid mining, and travel by wormhole, data centers will float around all over the universe. But sorry to break it to you folks: you and I are not going to see it.
The idea of data centers in space is so superficially dumb that it crumbles under even the slightest amount of critical thinking. The best argument I can make in favor of it is, “Hey, nobody likes data centers in their neighborhoods! How about in space?”
But that argument would apply equally well to rendering plants, garbage dumps, nuclear waste disposal sites, and Chuck E. Cheeses, yet we still haven’t located any of those things in orbit because it is utterly absurd.
Right now, launching one pound of material into space costs almost $2,000. It would be very expensive to get nothing more than the data center servers up there. It would not only be the servers, though. Plenty of others have already noticed that there is much more radiation in space (thank you for your service, magnetosphere), so any high-end chips up there would also need heavy shielding.
Data centers are famously hot, and use water or air for cooling. Space is famously without water or air. There is nothing to carry the heat away, unless you want to additionally launch a bunch of heavy and expensive radiator fins.
Then there’s the power. Sure, solar panels produce more energy in space, but they also degrade faster. Nuclear reactors in orbit are just a bad idea for a whole host of reasons. If you were to launch enough solar panels into space to power a data center, you would come out way ahead simply planting them in, say, Arizona.
Have you been out West? We do not lack for nearly vacant cow pastures and scrubland in the United States. But the reasons data centers have to be located near somewhere at least somewhat populated are the same as the reasons they wouldn’t work in space. Out in the middle of nowhere, as in space, there is no infrastructure for massive power and cooling needs. There also aren’t four or five people nearby who know what they’re doing who can come in and fix all the crap that’s inevitably going to break.
Let’s say the cost of launching things into orbit comes way down. For the sake of argument, let’s assume it’ll cost $6 per pound to get into orbit (roughly the same price it costs me to mail a pound of crap to Ohio right now). I asked AI what my house weighs (one of the more practical uses for the AI that all these data centers are supposed to ultimately be for). Even if it only cost $6 a pound to launch my house into space, the expense would still total close to a million bucks (not counting the foundation). Folks, I hate to admit it, but my house is way smaller than a data center, and it is worth way less than a million dollars whether in situ or in space.
Gretchen, stop trying to make data centers in space happen; it’s not going to happen. Musk thinks his investors are idiots (though to be fair, Jeff Bezos, who has also floated data centers in space [not literally], also thinks his investors are idiots).
SpaceX won’t totally collapse like Theranos did, because unlike Theranos, SpaceX does have some technology that functions in reality. But by making ridiculous claims that data centers in space are going to ever provide value to investors, Musk is only revealing himself more and more as the con artist he is.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
The post Data Centers In Space: An Absurd Fantasy Dumber Than Running Hundreds Of Tests On A Drop Of Blood appeared first on Above the Law.
I know we all have the attention span of goldfish now, but remember Theranos, the company founded by a 19-year-old college dropout that claimed to be able to conduct hundreds of medical tests on a single drop of blood? Yeah, it couldn’t do that, because it is physically impossible. You simply need more blood than that.
Plenty of people who did not quit college at 19 could have told you at the time (some of them did) that what Theranos said it could do was preposterous. But most people don’t really have any idea how blood testing actually works, and using a lot less blood sounds like a good idea since nobody particularly likes to get poked with a needle. That was enough to propel Theranos to a $9 billion valuation before it all inevitably collapsed into nothing.
Recently, Elon Musk pitched orbital data centers — that is, putting data centers in space instead of on the ground — as part of his attempt to drive up the stock price of his company SpaceX. This is not working, because public investors in SpaceX are not quite as dumb as the private investors in Theranos were.
There will not be any profitable data centers orbiting around the earth while anyone reading this is still alive. Maybe someday, when we have quantum something something, asteroid mining, and travel by wormhole, data centers will float around all over the universe. But sorry to break it to you folks: you and I are not going to see it.
The idea of data centers in space is so superficially dumb that it crumbles under even the slightest amount of critical thinking. The best argument I can make in favor of it is, “Hey, nobody likes data centers in their neighborhoods! How about in space?”
But that argument would apply equally well to rendering plants, garbage dumps, nuclear waste disposal sites, and Chuck E. Cheeses, yet we still haven’t located any of those things in orbit because it is utterly absurd.
Right now, launching one pound of material into space costs almost $2,000. It would be very expensive to get nothing more than the data center servers up there. It would not only be the servers, though. Plenty of others have already noticed that there is much more radiation in space (thank you for your service, magnetosphere), so any high-end chips up there would also need heavy shielding.
Data centers are famously hot, and use water or air for cooling. Space is famously without water or air. There is nothing to carry the heat away, unless you want to additionally launch a bunch of heavy and expensive radiator fins.
Then there’s the power. Sure, solar panels produce more energy in space, but they also degrade faster. Nuclear reactors in orbit are just a bad idea for a whole host of reasons. If you were to launch enough solar panels into space to power a data center, you would come out way ahead simply planting them in, say, Arizona.
Have you been out West? We do not lack for nearly vacant cow pastures and scrubland in the United States. But the reasons data centers have to be located near somewhere at least somewhat populated are the same as the reasons they wouldn’t work in space. Out in the middle of nowhere, as in space, there is no infrastructure for massive power and cooling needs. There also aren’t four or five people nearby who know what they’re doing who can come in and fix all the crap that’s inevitably going to break.
Let’s say the cost of launching things into orbit comes way down. For the sake of argument, let’s assume it’ll cost $6 per pound to get into orbit (roughly the same price it costs me to mail a pound of crap to Ohio right now). I asked AI what my house weighs (one of the more practical uses for the AI that all these data centers are supposed to ultimately be for). Even if it only cost $6 a pound to launch my house into space, the expense would still total close to a million bucks (not counting the foundation). Folks, I hate to admit it, but my house is way smaller than a data center, and it is worth way less than a million dollars whether in situ or in space.
Gretchen, stop trying to make data centers in space happen; it’s not going to happen. Musk thinks his investors are idiots (though to be fair, Jeff Bezos, who has also floated data centers in space [not literally], also thinks his investors are idiots).
SpaceX won’t totally collapse like Theranos did, because unlike Theranos, SpaceX does have some technology that functions in reality. But by making ridiculous claims that data centers in space are going to ever provide value to investors, Musk is only revealing himself more and more as the con artist he is.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].
