And how much of that power would be spent on high speed communications with Earth that aren't, you know, a megabit or two per second

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chaos_emergent 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I grew up on a rural farm in California with a dial-up connection that significantly hampered my ability to participate in the internet as a teenager. I got Starlink installed at my parents' house about five years ago, and it's resulted in me being able to spend considerably more time at home.

Even with their cheapest home plan, we're getting like 100 Mbps down and maybe 20 to 50 up. So it's just not true at all that you would have connections that are a megabit or two per second.

	▲	bastawhiz 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's not what I'm suggesting. The post says "deep space". If you're going to try to harvest even a tiny percentage of the sun's energy, you're not doing that in Earth's orbit. The comparison is a webcam feed from Mars.

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crote 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's pretty much a solved problem. We've had geostationary constellations for TV broadcast at hundreds of megabytes for decades now, and lasers for sat-to-sat comms seems to be making decent progress as well.

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bastawhiz 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the Sun’s power

Which satellites are operating from "deep space"?

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versavolt 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Those are for video. AI Chat workflows use a fraction of the data.

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bastawhiz an hour ago | parent [-]

That's silly on so many levels.

1. the latency is going to be insane.

2. AI video exists.

3. vLLMa exist and take video and images as input.

4. When a new model checkpoint needs to go up, are we supposed to wait months for it to transfer?

5. A one million token context window is ~4MB. That's a few milliseconds terrestrially. Assuming zero packet loss, that's many seconds

6. You're not using TCP for this because the round trip time is so high. So you can't cancel any jobs if a user disconnects.

7. How do you scale this? How many megabits has anyone actually ever successfully sent per second over the distances in question? We literally don't know how to get a data center worth of throughput to something not in our orbit, let alone more than double digit megabits per second.

	▲	versavolt 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Grok doesn’t have video as far as I know. I don’t think it’s so absurd. I don’t know how you scale this. But it seems pretty straightforward.

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chartisma 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

and, of course and inter-satellite comms and earth base station links to get the data up and down. Starlink is one thing at just above LEO a few hundred km and 20km apart, but spreading these around 10s of thousands of km and thosands of km apart is another thing

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tootie 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The intractable problem is heat dissipation. There is to little matter in space to absorb excess heat. You'd need thermal fins bigger than the solar cells. The satellite's mass would be dominated by the solar panels and heat fins such that maybe 1% of the mass would be usable compute. It would be 1000x easier to leave them on the moon and dissipate into the ground and 100000x easier to just keep making them on earth.