this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2025
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They’re also talking about data centers in space, yet are too cheap to use anything but evaporative cooling + supplemental gas generators on Earth.
I did some math on, amongst other things, launch costs for an Earth-data center sized installation, or the area needed to radiatively cool it, and it is fun:
https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/heatrad.php
collapsed inline media
See that power of four? Areas get very large, like kilometers wide, if you want your coolant below a typical 300K (~30C), and apparently no one told Bezos that little detail.
Those space construction startups know what they’re doing. They’re selling billionaires a bridge to nowhere; and it’s working.
https://youtu.be/XS5rbLBflaI
Capitalism has a whole lot of cult-like qualities. The space stuff just shows we are end game.
That's just wealth redistribution /s
Guess I should have gone
CHAinstead ofINT.I might have gotten some of that billionaire money to buy more RAM.
Look, I'm not saying it's a good thing. In fact, it would be an insanely wasteful use of resources, labor, energy, etc.
That said, folks are all about "eat the rich" and this may very well be the closest thing to that.
"Scam the rich," perhaps?
So for a kilowatt and 300K with a poor quality radiator (0.8)
Area = 1000/(0.8*5.670373x10^-8*30^4)
=1000/367.4401704
≈2.72m^2
So using the approximation of 1kW/m^2 of solar, you need on the order of 2.7x the area of solar for radiators
That doesn't seem too bad, and is on par with what the ISS has. The radiators on ISS have emissivity about 0.91
Ed. With the same quality of radiator on the ISS it's about 2.4*solar kilowatts