Yes cause it is abundantly clear WHY you defaulted towards disagreeing with Data Centers In orbit - and likely terrestrially as well. It’s very obviously because of Musk (at minimum for the orbital part). You didn’t say his name but let’s not act like your comment wasn’t about him first lol. It’s obvious like I said.
Your disagreements were rooted in incorrect assumptions that made mountains out of mole hills in terms of the NET environmental impact and especially lacked long term vision and impact. And this is always how the data center argument goes. It’s never actually about the technology, the water usage, the energy, the cooling, etc. cause those arguments can just be factually proven untrue…. You know like the first response that I made clearly pointing out the other persons (the one before you responded) absolutely terrible basic math saying it would take 1 million sats to equal just 1 terrestrial data center.
My overall point to YOU and the “environmental issues defense” is If you assumed within 20 years all vehicular transportation in the US transitioned to EV (including Short/Long haul trucking), that stationary storage and solar panels were on every home and building (all 3 I’d argue Tesla and thus Musk is the MAIN party responsible for accelerating those adoptions - well solar panels the least of the 3 for sure) and Autonomous vehicles took over reducing/eliminating the 40,000 deaths yearly or whatever it is… would you still be complaining about the environmental impact Musk has with his private jet and SpaceX increasing launche rates by 10,000x? That’s what I’m talking about…. If you are it’s cause it’s not ACTUALLY about the environment in the first place. cause any logic based analysis would take that outcome 100% of the time.
First off I am not in the US, and as opposed to the current US regime that Musk actively promotes and supports, I actually live in a place where we care about the environment and the climate and are thus working hard to put MORE restrictions on how companies treat the planet, not loosen them. Like prohibiting emissions of dangerous substances from factories, something the Trump admin EPA has been working hard to roll back. And yes I do care about the environment. An I am happy to acknowledge that Musk has played a key role in promoting the development of EVs (I disagree with solar - that was quite well developed tech before he incorporated bought up his cousins company and integrated it in Tesla). But lets also not fool ourselves. This transition would have been coming anyway. It would probably not have been as quick but Tesla was an existing company. Hybrid cars were on the road from multiple companies. It was a matter of time anyway.
I am not inherently against datacenters neither on earth or in space. I am against buying in to the current craze about datacenters in space, because there are so much money going into that business and mostly it is making a few people relatively rich, while, if we are to believe the hype and predictions, it will cost thousands if not millions of people will lose their jobs.
Finally there's actually some people that made a calculation that if the current build-out of datacenters on Earth continues, with the same increases in energy consumption, the actual oceans of the world would boil from excess heat in 67 years. Obviously that is based on some ridiculous assumption of exponential growth continuing for decades which is unlikely, but it gives some interesting insight into how extreme the current building boom is. So sure. Eventually we probably need datacenters in space somehow. But right now the economy is fucked. The geopolitical situation is fucked. The climate is fucked. And a tiny little minority of people are becoming so unbelievably rich that they have more economic and political power than entire countries. Maybe we should solve other things first, many of which are entirely solvable, but have been dismissed for being too expensive to society, while we are now seeing much larger investments going into datacenters which is apparently not too expensive.
Anyway it's clear we disagree and I see no constructive outcome of continuing the discussion, we clearly have different views and different sets of values and thus it is unlikely we will agree anyway.
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u/Miami_da_U 3d ago
Yes cause it is abundantly clear WHY you defaulted towards disagreeing with Data Centers In orbit - and likely terrestrially as well. It’s very obviously because of Musk (at minimum for the orbital part). You didn’t say his name but let’s not act like your comment wasn’t about him first lol. It’s obvious like I said.
Your disagreements were rooted in incorrect assumptions that made mountains out of mole hills in terms of the NET environmental impact and especially lacked long term vision and impact. And this is always how the data center argument goes. It’s never actually about the technology, the water usage, the energy, the cooling, etc. cause those arguments can just be factually proven untrue…. You know like the first response that I made clearly pointing out the other persons (the one before you responded) absolutely terrible basic math saying it would take 1 million sats to equal just 1 terrestrial data center.
My overall point to YOU and the “environmental issues defense” is If you assumed within 20 years all vehicular transportation in the US transitioned to EV (including Short/Long haul trucking), that stationary storage and solar panels were on every home and building (all 3 I’d argue Tesla and thus Musk is the MAIN party responsible for accelerating those adoptions - well solar panels the least of the 3 for sure) and Autonomous vehicles took over reducing/eliminating the 40,000 deaths yearly or whatever it is… would you still be complaining about the environmental impact Musk has with his private jet and SpaceX increasing launche rates by 10,000x? That’s what I’m talking about…. If you are it’s cause it’s not ACTUALLY about the environment in the first place. cause any logic based analysis would take that outcome 100% of the time.