Technology

This also reminds me of something else: Yes, you can have all kinds of problems in space missions. Not just bit flips.

I have been thinking about planning a mars mission. And one of the things that you need to guarantee is the safety of the crew in untested environments. Like on the surface of mars, you have to guarantee that the crew can survive at least until the next ship can arrive to help them. And launch windows to mars appear only once every two earth years (once every martian year), so crew has to survive that long.

You also have to survive when there's a power outage for any reason. Could be that the coworker stumbled over a cable and pulled out a power line's connection. Could be that there's 3-months-long dust storms (which would block solar panels). (they appear each martian year, sometimes more sometimes less severe, i think typical duration is less than 50 days, but just to be sure make that 100 days). Could be that there's a problem with your electronics and they simply won't work anymore and you can't figure out why.

So imagine you're standing in your apartment. I recommend you live inside the Starship for the first few years because it's already a habitat since you flew in it for 6 months to get to mars in the first place.

Power outage. How do you get out of the door? There's obviously a pressure door between your apartment and the outside world. And the power line's outside. So if the power line disconnects because a rover messed up and pulled it out, there's a power outage. And if the door is electrically operable, you can't get out of the door to repair it. That is why i say that every door has to be manually operable. Like, pressure doors should have manual operation mode. You need to be able to operate the pressure door with your bare hands. I already thought of some designs that can actually deliver that, but i'm too lazy to do a drawing now.

A swarm of ideally flat slab-like satellites could actually work. Sun side for solar, back side a surface optimized for infrared heat radiation.

But still, even with 10x10 meters and x1000 pieces, you only get the equivalent to a small crunching center. Ignoring the problems of strong radiation and replacing parts.

This seems monumentally stupid.

Wouldn't the more logical first approximation be to bury them underground, and then progress towards (perhaps) placing them in or near the ocean (obviously, within sealed containers, yadda yadda, salt corrosion, yadda yadda, inhospitable environ yadda yadda makes Poseidon angry).

I like the "yeet them into the sea" idea conceptually because (1) yeet them into the sea (2) in theory, you could power them via tidal/wave/OTEC (3) water cooling.

Seems...too obvious. There's probably a good reason (or bad ones - $$$) why this hasn't been tried yet. But I bet those reasons are eminently more solvable that "send em into space"

Like, very interesting article. It also mentions bit flips.

I think the major protection against bit flips is to use larger structure sizes. Like, today's desktop computers use structure sizes around 2 nm or sometimes even less than that. Which means you only need to shift a few electrons around to cause a bit flip. If you use larger wires inside the processor, they store more electrons so it takes more energy to flip them around. So there's a much much smaller number of radiation particles that have a minimum of that energy, so lower risk of bit flips.

Does anybody have actual numbers on the structure sizes needed to effectively prevent bit flips? I mean, outer space missions like NASA flights already need this today.

People don’t read enough hard sci-fi, in a realistic space battle you use missiles and other projectiles because they don’t heat up your ship

If you have any kind of laser crap, you need to dissipate the heat and that requires surface area

And that surface area is an easy target for your enemy’s kinetics… take out the cooling system and everyone is cooked alive. Nice.

You know how much it costs to transport stuff into space? Well, currently, around $1k/kg of material. Let that sink in.

Note this is only payload. Ship's own weight is already included in this.

Don't you need an atmosphere to transfer heat? Otherwise the dissipation is super slow.

I’ve had to explain these points a few times to my friends who love the muskrat. They think he’s a genius for wanting orbital data centers.

space is cold!

No, space is empty. If you want to be pedantic, space is very hot actually

And yet another lost of reasons why these billionaires are fucking removed. Yes, im using the horrible R word, but "idiots" just doesn't suffice.

These people are investing billions of dollars on unproven technology and now want to put trillions more in pushing those unproven technologies to space which is just removed levels of stupid. But the investments will happen, a ginormous amount of pollution will be made and it's all nothing for humanity and a huge amount of money for a select few billionaires.

Fuck this time line, fuck removed billionaires

We need a wealth cap. Nobody should be able to do shit like this with impunity just because they have "enough money to do so".

Give me a 1M wealth cap world wide and I'll give you a world where everyone is happy at relatively equal levels of wealth

You would need to launch so ridiculously much into orbit. The ISS is rounded up 200 kW of solar power. 0.2 MW. Say you want the equivalent of a gigawatt data center. 1000 MW. Yeah, that's about 5000 ISS sizes objects. It needs a bunch more cooling, and a data center doesn't need habital zones, so a pretty barebones ISS. Launch 3 roughly ISS sized objects per day and you're done in 4.5 years. Somehow I don't really see that as a realistic plan.