It's lala land nonsense.

- Data centres need a lot of power = giant vast solar panels

- Data centres need a lot of cooling. That's some almighty heatsinks you're going need

- They will need to be radiation-hardened to avoid memory corruption = even more mass

- The hardware will be redundant in like 2 years tops and will need replacing to stay competitive

- Data centres are about 100x bigger (not including solar panels and heat sinks) than the biggest thing we've ever put in space

Tesla is losing market share (and rank increasingly poorly against alternatives), his robots are gonna fail, this datacentre ambition needs to break the laws of physics, grok/twitter is a fake news pedo-loving cesspit that's gonna be regulated into oblivion. Its only down from here on out.

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geoffeg 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe instead of housing life, civilizations develop Dyson's spheres to house data centers. Solar panels on the interior, thermal radiators on the exterior and the data centers make up the structure in between. Combine that Von Neumann probes and you've got a fun new Fermi paradox hypothesis!

	▲	sfink 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Don't combine it with von Neumann probes and you've solved the Fermi paradox: a civilization that puts that much work into computing power is either doing the equivalent of mining crypto and going nowhere, or is doing AI and is so dependent on it that they inevitably form a vast echo chamber (echo sphere?) that only wants to talk to itself (itselves?) and can't bear to be left out by adding the latency unavoidably added by distance. tl;dr: civilizations advanced enough to travel between stars end up trapped by the resources and physics required to keep up with the Joneses.

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cyberax 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> - The hardware will be redundant in like 2 years tops and will need replacing to stay competitive

Hey! It can be de-orbited onto the location of your choosing. I bet you can sell this service to the DoD!

Barring that, you can sell it on the global market to the highest bidder.