Shift debt onto the public? How does that work exactly?
Owning stock in a company that is in debt does not make the stockholder in debt. It just means the investment is at risk if the company can't pay off the loan.
For the record, I'm against the government having a position in OpenAI, or any other AI company. At this time, there is no need to rescue the industry, or to have a strategic stake in it.
In the last few weeks republican politicians and their supporters have publicly said Nixon shouldn't have resigned and was treated unfairly. Apparently what he did was totally fine by them. Vance in particular expressed sympathy for Nixon. Who's woke now? Surreal.
It's worth remembering something about Nixon: we have the tapes. He incriminated himself in his own voice, by committing obstruction of justice.
Now, I'd like to hear whether the current administration considers obstruction of justice to be a core act of the presidency (with absolute immunity) or an official act (with presumed immunity). On second thought, never mind, maybe I don't need to hear it.
... it's just another pack of lies like everything else Musk hypes up.
Counterargument: Who would have predicted a few years ago that one private company would dominate global launch, launching more by every metric than the rest of the world combined, and -- all by itself -- triple the number of satellites in orbit in 7 years.
Sure, 200Xing the satellite count is a lot harder than tripling the satellite count, about 66 times harder. But if Starship is successful (by no means a given, also far from impossible), SpaceX will reduce per-kg launch costs by 100X, maybe more.
I'm skeptical... but I would also not just write it off as a "pack of lies". The things SpaceX is actively working on should make the launch part of it feasible. Will it be cost-effective? That's a harder question, and heat dissipation is the core thing that may make it infeasible.
Also, the final paragraph of the summary seems to be confused:
So, why are the hyperscalers hyping orbital data centers? Answer: because it's lucrative. "The Elon Musk part of it is honestly genius because he's got xAI building the data centers, SpaceX sending them to space, and Tesla building solar panels," Genkina says. "It's almost like he's paying himself."
Yes, SpaceX will be incredibly lucrative if it owns the whole vertical stack, building, launching and powering -- but only if it works. If it doesn't work, and if orbital compute isn't cheaper than planet-bound compute, then SpaceX will have no buyers.
The other possibility is that it's just a pump and dump, but that's not how Musk has ever worked in the past. Yes, he makes crazy promises, and delivers only half of them, and delivers years after the promised date, but those half-realized, years-late results are still often world-changing.
Thank you for making my case for me. Railroads did not just do whatever they wanted. Sometimes they were challenged in court. Sometimes they won. Sometimes they lost. The point is that they didn't just do whatever they wanted with no push-back.
But you appear to claim Musk is the only one who should decide what to do with space because "it's his money." I disagree. I expect that he will need regulatory approvals, and must comply with space treaties. He may even be challenged in court. And if he is, he'll need a stronger defense than just saying "it's my money."
As for airlines, they can't just do whatever they want either. They need to file flight plans, get approval for routes, negotiate with countries for landing privileges, and so on. Your retort about planes flying over someone's house is a strawman. "People" does not just mean individuals. It also means the governments that represent their interests. Including the nuisance of planes flying over their houses. Airports have curfews for that very reason.
So instead the revolutionists just destroy the downlink stations?
In this case, we already have a real world example - starlink terminals in Russia and Ukraine. It's nowhere near as straight forward to attempt to identify and disable millions of distributed terminals (google says they sold 3.9 million of them by end of 2024) compared to about 12,000 data centers world wide (and only a small subset of those are new AI ones).
You can't put 100% of the infrastructure in space, without also putting 100% of what uses the infrastructure in space.
But you could put 99% of the infrastructure in space (like everything that's in a data center), while allowing 0.0001% of what uses it to remain on earth (a fictional-for-now cabal that runs the world; 0.0001% of the world population is more than twice as many as total billionaires in the world).
I'm not a doomsday prepper but, from what I hear, a lot of the ultra wealthy ARE prepping. It makes no sense not to do some prep when one has that much wealth. It's just another bet to hedge. If WWIII takes out much of the internet and data centers, it doesn't matter what the cost was to get this up there - whomever controls it would have a huge upper hand. Global satellite network with the compute to back it up and downlinks available anywhere you bring your terminal.
So you don't see generating massive amounts of heat, with nowhere to dump it besides passive radiation into a vacuum as a problem. Go on, what's the solution for that?
Radiators.
Since the heat out at most equals the solar power in, and the two-sided flat-plate equilibrium temperature of a panel receiving solar energy is 331K (58 C), if the solar panels are also the radiators, heat rejection is manageable.
(Completely accurate only far from the Earth. In Low Earth Orbit, you also have to account for albedo and infrared radiation from the Earth.)
Ribosomes do a job a bit more complicated than "catalyze reactions."
Things like nuclear magnetic resonance, lasers, quantum mechanics, and the fundamental mathematics we base encryption in today were all thought to be "stupid" or "solution in search of a problem" and yet pretty much everything you rely on today depends on them.
Non sequitur. None of your examples were ever thought to be "stupid." Maybe controversial for a time, but not stupid.
Science advances through speculation followed by verification with experiment/observation. There are no "stupid" ideas in science, just wrong ones. And they get discarded.
We live in a free society. You're free to do whatever you want with your own time and money. If this causes you to lose sleep at night, you might prefer Cuba, North Korea or (as of recently) Russia.
Free to do whatever you want, as long as it does not impact others negatively. And launching a million satellites into earth-orbit space is likely to do just that. It's several orders of magnitude beyond the number of active satellites currently there. People shouldn't be allowed to just go ahead and do such things without compliance with regulations and treaties, just because they have the "time and money" to accomplish them.
And BTW, Russia has been un-free for a while now, not just "recently."
We all know you ain't bankrolling it yourself, and the people you seem to think will pay for all this wont.
Doesn't really matter because it has to be done, unless we want to pay the much, much higher costs of just living with the hotter planet. We're all going to pay, one way or the other. It's just a question of whether we want it to be expensive or really, really expensive.
Lick more boots. This isn't progress.
HAHAHAHA The rouge scare is back!
Define "we."
People who built railroads and airlines needed the consent of the people who lived on the land and below the sky.
You seem to think Musk should be allowed to just go ahead and do whatever he wants with earth-orbit space because "it's his money."
The only reason to have data centers in space is if you want to do processing in space, for lower latency or something similar.
Maybe not the only reason. One thing I'm gathering (or reminded of) in the current discussion is that space datacenters obviate the significant sociopolitical and environmental complexities of terrestrial ones. Of course, they introduce a number of new complexities, including sociopolitical and (space-)environmental ones.
Assuming Musk knows all this as well, and he would, is there any reason he shouldn't try if he thinks he can do it? It's his money.
It's everybody's sky. You want him to fill it with a million satellites?
Never mind, I know the answer already.
Most satellites need to be carefully engineered to maintain their temperature range without getting too hot or too cold.
For example, with radiator panels that are oriented to be in the shade. Of course, that adds mass and structural complexity to the spacecraft, and therefore increases the cost to build, test, and launch it. So, it's only done when heat-management is a significant concern that can't be handled by letting the spacecraft hull radiate the heat.
I'm guessing that orbital datacenters will need radiator panels up the wazoo.
"Show me a good loser, and I'll show you a loser." -- Vince Lombardi, football coach
