To Steelman the topic, Musk’s whole alleged mission is to make humans a multi-planet species that can survive an earth killing event.

To that end, a small data center space isn’t about unit-economics, it’s a bigger mission. So the question we should consider is what can we put into space the further that mission. Can we put a meaningful sum of human knowledge out there for preservation? It sounds like “yes,” even if we can’t train ChatGPT models out there yet.

When I was a kid, I had to go to CCD, a religious after school program for Catholics.

The whole time I was there it was a mental game of trying to steel man the contradictory or incoherent stuff, using my brain power to try and rewrite things to make sense.

After some years, I woke up and realized that’s what I was doing, and even if I could do it in my mind, that didn’t make the source material rational.

Heres hoping you have a similar moment.

The problem of datacenters in space and knowledge preservation/disaster redundancy are entirely disjoint.

Datacenters in space have a lifespan measured in years. Single-digit years. Communicating with such an installation requires relatively advanced technology. In an extinction level crisis, there will be extremely little chance of finding someone with the equipment, expertise, and power to download bulk data. And don't forget that you have less than a decade to access this data before the constellation either fails or deorbits.

Meanwhile people who actually care about preserving knowledge in a doomsday crisis have created film reels containing a dump of GitHub and enough preamble that civilizations in the far future can reconstruct an x86 machine from scratch. These are buried under glaciers on earth.

We've also launched (something like) a microfilm dump of knowledge to the moon which can be recovered and read manually any time within the next several hundred or thousand years.

Datacenters in space don't solve any of the problems posed because they simply will not last long enough.

Let's say there is an earth killing event, and let's say there is an outpost on Mars with some people on it. How much does it really matter that some humans survive, in light of the enormous catastrohophe that killed all life on earth? Is it a very worthwhile objective for our species to persist a while longer, or should we not just accept that also life itself will will die out on geological or astronomical time scales?

A data center in space is probably toast after some years of space radiation.

High performance chips are made for the shielded atmosphere. Imagine the cost launching all the extra shielding that you don't need on earth.

It is beyond stupid. Comical levels. I can't believe people are trying to find any justification.

If that's really the case: wouldn't merging or collaborating with Nvidia make more sense then with xAI?

A sum or product of human knowledge is not humanity: that specific mission (putting it into space for preservation or contact) has been done (Voyagers and others) and is done continuously (radiowaves).

Making a dent into making humans a multiplanetary species requires making a lot of companion species as well; the task requires much more elementary stuff (relative to the mission), at the ground level, than Musk is demonstrating to do (at technical, entrepreneurial and political level).

This is a con, from the start. It just worked so far so some people fall for it.

Musk's whole mission is to scam even more people. Unfortunately people still buy his bullshit even though he couldn't deliver on anything, and just converts one failure to hyping up his next idiotic product.

(Yes, I know what steel manning is)

Sure but you could do that with a simple disc in space