This is complete bullshit.

Anyone who thinks we’ll have data centres in space before we have a civilisation changing step up in surface to orbit space drives and materials science is an idiot.

How the hell does anyone think a rocket is ever going to compete with a prime mover towing two trailers, or an ocean going vessel.

We’re not exactly short of land.

And no, space is not cold.

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thehappypm 33 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The 24/7 energy is a plus.

	▲	Tadpole9181 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You know what else has 24//7 energy? The bog standard power grid, some solar panels, and some batteries. I can even have redundancy and regular maintenance cycles on the ground.

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

All of this sounds a lot like how ULA, ESA thought reusable rockets were a pipe dream. These are engineering challenges, not physical laws that need to be broken.

	▲	rf15 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		yeah, but: Data centers, fundamentally, are a solved problem. The rest is just cost balancing - and space looks like complete rubbish when it comes to all kinds of costs, including and especially when it comes to maintenance.
	▲	EA-3167 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		This sounds like someone who concludes that FTL is possible because “once people thought that flight was impossible!” But we have and had ample evidence of flight in nature, we just didn’t understand how it worked. A similar search across the observable universe reveals no sign of FTL behavior. Sometimes when you understand the science a comparison to some time when people didn’t isn’t as moving or compelling as you seem to imagine.

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ordu an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> space is not cold.

Yes, it is. There is such a phenomenon as infrared radiation. You feel it on your skin right now. It is hard normally to separate them from other ways you exchange heat with your environment, but in some conditions it is easy. Like when there is a hot object you can feel it to be hot even if you don't touch it or the air heated by the object. Likewise you can feel that a cold object is cold thing without touching it or cold air around it.

These experiments would be hard to run in space, because it is highly polluted by vacuum and it is not a good idea to expose human limbs to vacuum. But artificial sensors could be used for that.