>as they are not allowed to use oil or coal
Or natural gas. No carbon. Carbon fuels amplify the already obscene thermal output by at least 2.5.
Also, none of them is dumb enough to go fission. The time to power is an order of magnitude greater than their expiration date if they don't have it. And their server and power costs are bad enough. They don't need to compound those expenses with the costliest source of energy available.
Dunno man, nukes charged the battery that's bringing you this post. Nukes that just finished a major refurbishment that came in ahead of schedule and under budget.
Nuclear power requires a large complex regulatory body that isn't at risk of being interfered with for profit and we burned that bridge to the ground in the last election.
So maybe it's just you? I think I'd be looking at your corruption problem rather than just deciding it's inevitable and writing things off because of it.
No. There are quantum resistant public key encryption schemes. There are also still serious questions whether breaking non-rsistant public key encryption is even practical.
The big application for good quantum computers is probably materials science, but that's not as sexy as reading each other's mail.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/2...
Well, I hope you didn't buy stock based on that, uh, belief.
Americans don't generally compare themselves to other countries. This article is no different. Death rate is a fairly concrete, immediately available metric. Life expectancy (at birth) is obviously something that has to be estimated since it's talking about things that are going to happen decades in the future.
Provided the death rate isn't too much affected by the COVID loss of a disproportional number of older people, the US death rate looks like it's come back down to it's previous trend line of long-term decrease, likely indicating a resumption of previous increases in life expectancy that are mediocre by world standards and not great by developed world standards.
Life expectancy and death rate are not the same thing. The US has a younger population than, e.g. Spain, so it has a lower death rate (this year at least) despite also have a lower life expectancy.
Valve, no. The Internet, yes.
https://hackaday.com/2017/04/1...
This isn't e-ink, but it's not actually completely different, and this guy tells you exactly how to do it:
Sure.
Want a video?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
This one looks pretty nice:
They haven't released the source files yet but it's not exactly rocket science to put one together. E-ink screens are readily available, as are microcontrollers.
SpaceX made $75 billion actual real dollars. It's in the bank.
Sure, the individual VCs aren't allowed to take their actual cash out of the company until August 6. Want to bet the datacenter hype keeps going until at least then?
Elon Musk, or whoever manages him, already learned not to post speculative tweets about his companies followed up shortly later by "just jokes lol".
It's not great, but I don't think that's the least practical part of it. Reasonable people have done the math and you can almost make it work just by making the radiators the same size as, and putting them on the back of, the solar panels. Starlink satellites already generate and dissipate a kilowatt plus.
The impractical part is that the whole thing is going to deorbit and burn up after five years. Sure, maybe you don't want the five year old GPUs, but replacing the panels and radiators every five years is going to be more expensive than building twice as much on the ground.
Conspiracy theories are silly, and unnecessary.
Remember when Elon ruminated about hyperloop and everyone went nuts? Well, this time he ruminated about space datacentres. Oh, and SpaceX investors cashed out for ~$85 billion.
It is LEO.
Size is not free. Besides having to get the thing up there, which might come down to merely very expensive, there's drag in low Earth orbit, and the bigger the surface area of your satellite the more propulsion you need to keep it up there. The life of Starlink satellites is primarily limited by their propellant.
Even if you ignore launch costs entirely, is it cheaper to put your datacentre in space and replace it and your power plant every few years, or put it in a nice desert or on a floating island somewhere instead? Oh, and you have to engineer it to be completely maintenance free for the first option too.
What's the downside? SpaceX stock got pumped for their IPO. The money is made. As long as the hype keeps going they can raise more any time they want, or Elon could sell some of his shares. If it turns out to be unworkable, SpaceX (and subsidiaries) are back where they started.
There aren't really any unsolved engineering problems. SpaceX can absolutely put a rack of nvidia GPUs into low orbit. We could have done that in the 70s. The argument is whether it's economical or not.
Which is cheaper, putting a thousand square metres of solar panels, a rack of GPUs, a vacuum cooling system and propulsion in low orbit and incinerating and replacing it all every few years, or the panels, GPUs and a convective radiator that is ~50x more efficient on the ground and runs for twenty plus?
If I put some bricks or concrete blocks in a vacant lot and they assembled themselves into a house you'd think that was pretty cool.
The use of money is all the advantage there is to having money. -- B. Franklin
