Just because you don't understand how something can work doesn't make it ludicrous. People like you are hell bent on destroying what's left of the Earth by turning it into a computer. If we left progress to those without an imagination, we wouldn't even have had a working calculator.
It's the physics of cooling the beasts and the communication delays that make those plans ludicrous.
To turn your assertion on its head, the fact that the supporters don't seem to be able (or willing) to do the math to fact check these proposals is not an indicator that the plans will work.
As a starting point for comparison, the total power budget of the ISS is under 100kW and a single supercomputer rack dissipates about 4x that. What changes to the ISS can be made to get 100x more power and dissipate 100x more heat?
Oh I have done the math. There are multiple ways to get cooling to work in space:
1. There is no real size limit to radiators in space, especially when in solar orbit.
2. High temperature chip architectures can be used, operating at 600K.
3. Heat pipes can bring the temperature even higher, such as to 1200K.
4. Special 3D radiator geometries can be used to optimize heat escape.
5. Metamaterials can be used to optimize photon emission in the best directions.
Together, these will shrink the required radiator area dramatically. Beyond these standard ideas, other exotic approaches exist at the edge of viability.
The ISS in contrast is restricted considering it has to sit in Earth orbit.
You misused a comma; it doesn't belong where you used it.
Just because there are ninety nine ways to do something wrong doesn't mean there couldn't exist one way to do it right. In the case of space datacenters, there absolutely exists a way to do it effectively. Dumb VCs will never know the difference.
Everyone has an anecdote of the immigrant they know who's a much better "American" in their values. The same for anecdotes of the people with the least American values being home grown and inbred
I’d have thought the idea that you should have shot down the drone that’s hunting you might be a clue it’s not a comment aimed at the average domestic WiFi user.
As a long time space nerd, I'm not sure what this accomplishes by repeating the previous stunts that failed to usher in the promised space frontier.
Apollo was, IMO, not successful at changing the course of human history. A really cool footnote, sure, but everything else that was to follow, nope, just a bunch of neat, interesting but ultimately meh science missions.
An exciting change would be more like Delta-V/Critical Mass, but NASA is not going to deliver that, at least not in any form it has taken thus far.
The guidelines ask us to avoid being curmudgeonly. I'm sure you didn't mean to come across that way, but could you try not to make Hacker News the kind of place that responds with “meh” to a successful space mission?
My pessimism comes from a hindsight that the Apollo missions, while amazing failed to create the future they promised. Looking at how the missions were designed, the political focus, the academic infighting of NASA scientists trying to keep niche research funded.
I fail to see how this time, the same strategy will produce a different result.
I also don't expect benevolent billionaires to fill that either. I hope I would in their place, but I'll not likely get the chance.to find out.
To end on an optimistic note, tang and Velcro are pretty dope.
I blame the "space race" narrative - it made everything unsustainably expensive just to beat the goal of landing on the Moon by the end of the decade and before the Soviets. That also made the program even more dependant on political whims and easy target for budget cuts in the Vietnam era.
I recommend looking into the space flight plans from the pre Apollo - while tere were bonkers ideas like Project Horizon, most of the plans sounded quite sensible, with incremental building of space infrastructure and emphasis on cost and reusability (in the 1960s).
Of course when it became a race all the sustainability and infrastructure went out of the window and got sacrificed in the name of speed. :P
My point is this path doesn't lead to the future, it leads to the sad state of space between Apollo and this Shark Jump.
The first Orion (nuclear pulse) has a much more interesting story and would have made us an interplanetary species before we had the iPhone. But it was killed by Kennedy, became space wasn't what he was worried about.... And maybe hundreds of nukes in space might make some countries edgy.
Suarez is, IMO, very good at researching current/near tech and mixing it into a good story about what is possible with what we have right now. Nothing in the books is really out of our reach except the will and perhaps strategic discipline to make and execute the plan.
Huh? The research done to develop the flight control computer for Apollo (and IBCMs of the time) lead directly to modern microcomputers. It’s hard to name something more impactful than that.
It could easily have taken another decade or two to develop the modern computer if not for the resources spent in the space program at that time. It still would have happened, but Apollo and the space program was soaking up something like 90% of computer demand for a full decade. Computers went from room sized behemoths to the size of a file cabinet in that time.
Im not sure that's an honest rhetoric, we have seen many other things in the last few years that have increased the demand for compute. It would seem lunacy to propose, to accelerate the miniaturization of compute we need to send a bunch of people to bounce around the moon, then we can forget about the space nonsense.
If the goal was begin the path that leads humans into so many resources it would take centuries before fighting over something was more profit than going to the next empty rock, we clearly failed.
I don't recall the year but it was a long while ago, the developer and CJD from cjdns were chatting about ygg, very similar projects just different projects.
The point was to put routing and privacy at the foundation of "the internet"
It was mostly a response to the knowledge of prolific government and corporate spying.
There are public nodes to piggyback on the legacy internet but it's another project that let's users build and control their own infrastructure, e.g. mesh-local
Actually, could anyone compare this to cjdns? On the surface they seem pretty similar. Docs say:
> Yggdrasil was created in order to build a decentralised routing scheme for mesh networks that can potentially operate at a global scale, motivated in particular by significant performance and scaling issues that were present in cjdns at the time.
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