TechStuff Redux: More AI in Space Than on Earth? Really!?
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What is the vision for data centers in space?
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Hey, it's Oz here. I'm traveling this week, and next week is the 4th of July, so we won't be publishing a Week in Tech episode for the next two Fridays. But you'll hear from all of our favorite tech contributors once again, starting July 10th. In the meantime, I wanted to share an episode from earlier this year that really expanded my understanding of space and the new frontier that's emerging. Hope you enjoy.
Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm Osvald Larsson, and this is the story. Today, I want to start with a clip from a recent interview with Elon Musk.
Five years from now, my prediction is we will launch and be operating every year more AI in space than the cumulative total on Earth.
Five years from now, we'll have more AI in space than on Earth. On the face of it, it seems insane. But I recently met someone who painted a compelling vision of humans as a space-faring race. Ariel Ekblor. She founded MIT's Space Exploration Lab. She's an inventor and a space venture capital investor. Her signature project is self-assembling structures in space, essentially magnetic prefabs that drag themselves into the correct configuration by magnetic attraction after they've been shot into space. The videos of this actually working albeit at small scale, are quite mind-blowing. And Ariel is planning to use this technology to build livable structures for humans in space. But I wanted to start with the story of the hour, data centers in space, which, it turns out, Ariel is already working on.
I wanted to know whether AI and space-obsessed billionaires could have the right idea that computation will be more efficient outside our atmosphere. Take a listen.
The first thing I think we should cover for data centers is space is not cold in the way that people think in the context of, oh, therefore it must be easy to cool data center electronics in space. Unfortunately, it's not that easy. In space, you don't have convective cooling. So if you think about how data centers are cooled on Earth, you literally, you flow water through something that's touching close to the data center or you flow air through them and it cools them down because that fluid passing by is helps distribute the heat.
It basically soaks up the heat. Soaks up the heat, yeah. And takes it away.
In space, there's no fluid and there's no air mass. So you don't have the same mechanism of just having passive air or even pushed air to go through your electronics. You mostly depend on radiative cooling. And that's hard. So it's not that it's better to put data centers in space because space is going to keep them cold. That's not the case. It's actually that if you're facing permitting issues on Earth because of townships struggling with the water burden or the grid burden.
Right.
or you want to get the carbon footprint of all of this energy from the data centers off of Earth and into space, space offers one massive advantage, which is raw, unfiltered sunlight above the atmosphere, so a much more efficient way to get closer to that energy. Is it the simplest place to put a data center? No. Is it necessarily the most engineering efficient way? You know, we could have a little argument about whether it is or isn't. I think Elon is really arguing that it is. There are certain aspects like radiative heat transfer that make it difficult, but not insurmountable. So that's kind of where we are. That's my overview take on AI data centers.
How does self-assembling architecture work in space?
And we are excited. for Rendezvous Robotics, one of the spin-outs that works within our ecosystem to be part of building the self-assembly capability that makes it possible to construct something that big in orbit.
So you've actually been working on this problem of data centers in space before it became hot.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the vision for data centers in space?
0:00–4:01
2
How does self-assembling architecture work in space?
4:01–10:34
3
What challenges exist for cooling data centers in space?
10:34–16:47
4
What are the advantages of placing data centers in space?
16:47–26:15
5
How has the cost of launching to space changed over the years?
26:15–32:22
6
What role do billionaires play in the future of space exploration?
32:22–43:32
Speakers
10 identifiedMore from TechStuff
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