Summarizer

> it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the Sun’s power We currently make around 1 TW of photovoltaic cells per year, globally. The proposal here is to launch that much to space every 9 hours, complete with attached computers, continuously, from the moon. edit: Also, this would capture a very trivial percentage of the Sun's power. A few trillionths per year.

>the best we can oh, we'll sure find a way to weaponize that energy for example - just imagine all those panels simultaneously turning their reflective back in a way to form gigantic mirror to focus reflected solar energy on your enemy, be that enemy in space or on the Earth/Moon/Mars ground. Basically space-scale version of 'death ray scyscrapper' https://www.businessinsider.com/death-ray-skyscraper-is-wrea... . Back in the day the Star Wars program was intending to use nuclear explosions to power the lasers, i guess once all that solar for AI gets deployed in space we wouldn't need the explosions anymore. Interesting that such space deployment can deny access to space to anybody else, and that means that any competitive superpower has to rush to deploy similar scale system of their own. Space race v2.

so, instead of recycling as many components as possible (a lot of these GPU have valuable resources inside) you simply burn them up. I'm guessing the next argument in the chain will be that we can mine materials from asteroids and such?

Bezos has been pushing manufacturing-in-space for a long time, as a ideal candidate for what to do in space that you might prefer to not do on Earth. Robotics, AI automation, manufacturing - combo it in space, let the robots manufacture for us in space. Abundant energy, low concerns about most forms of pollution. We'll need to dramatically improve our ability to transit mass to and from cheaply first of course (we're obviously talking many decades into the future).

> Bezos has been pushing manufacturing-in-space for a long time, as a ideal candidate for what to do in space that you might prefer to not do on Earth. Robotics, AI automation, manufacturing - combo it in space, let the robots manufacture for us in space. LOL, this seems so far off from the reality of what manufacturing looks like in reality. - sending raw materials up there - service technicians are necessary ALL THE TIME, in fully automated production lines - sending stuff back down Maybe I lack vision, but data centers in space is a 1000x times better idea and that is already a terrible idea.

Space manufacturing is a real thing, there are already companies trialling it. The factory is small, satellite sized, and it deorbits when the manufacturing run is done. The results are protected enough for them to be picked up from Earth. The justification (today) is that you can do very exotic things in zero-G that aren't possible on Earth. Growing ultra-pure crystals and fibre optics and similar.

Ok, that I might buy. If there is a product one can build in zero-G that one cannot build on earth. Especially something like growing crystalls. Sure. But trying to compete with something that can just as well be build on earth on the premise that it will be cheaper to do the same thing just in space is insane. It's the same issue that I have with data centers in space. I don't think there is any big technical hurdle to send a GPU rack into space and run it there. The problem is that I have a hard time to believe it is cheaper to run a datacenter in space. When you have to compete solely on cost, it will super hard.

Well you see, what you do is send a bunch of humanoid robots up there to do all the work. (please don't ask what we do when those break down)

I think it makes more sense if you invert the manufacturing cycle. Automated asteroid mining, and asteroid harvesting, are potential areas where we have strong tech, a reasonable pure automation story, and huge financial upsides. Trillion dollar asteroids... If we’re sourcing metals out there, and producing for orbital operations or interplanetary shenanigans, the need for computing and automation up there emerges. And I imagine for the billionaire investor class now is the window to make those kinds of plays. A whole set of galactic robber barons is gonna be crowned, and orbital automation is critical to deciding who that is.

>>sending raw materials up there That's what asteroid mining is for. >>service technicians are necessary ALL THE TIME Optimus is already very well tele-operated. Even though over time it can likely be trained to do specific tasks far better than even humans.

> That's what asteroid mining is for. It’s not necessarily cheaper energetically to get stuff from an asteroid than from Earth. You’d have to accelerate stuff from a wildly different orbit, and then steer it and slow it down. Metric tonnes of stuff. It’s not physically impossible, but it is wildly expensive (in pure energy terms, not even talking about money) and completely impractical with current technology. We just don’t have engines capable of doing this outside the atmosphere.

> That's what asteroid mining is for. I think you might have no sense of what it takes to go from a raw mined material to something that can be used in a factory. I am not saying it cannot be done. I am just saying it cannot be done in a way that is cheaper than on earth.

It's worth noting that the EACTS can at maximum dissipate 70kW of waste heat. And EEACTS (the original heat exchange system) can only dissipate another 14kW. That is together less than a single AI inference rack. And to achieve that the EACTS needs 6 radiator ORUs each spanning 23 meters by 11 meters and with a mass of 1100 kg. So that's 1500 square meters and 6 and a half metric tons before you factor in any of the actual refrigerant, pumps, support beams, valve assemblies, rotary joints, or cold side heat exchangers all of which will probably together double the mass you need to put in orbit. There is no situation where that makes sense. ----------- Manufacturing in space makes sense (all kinds of techniques are theoretically easier in zero G and hard vacuum). Mining asteroids, etc makes sense. Datacenters in space for people on earth? That's just stupid.

> Which opens up new markets like Mars etc. What do you project out of the Martian market?

There is nothing we need on Mars other than science. It's not a market because there isn't money to be made outside of what is required to do whatever economically useless but scientifically valuable efforts we can convince people to fund. We can't build an independent colony we can't live there any time soon. Arguably it may never make sense to live there.

With that attitude mankind would still be living in caves. Why build a farm and stay in one place - we should follow the animals around.

1. Mankind never systematically lived in caves; that's just where remains and rock paintings are more likely to have survived. 2. Farming didn't evolve from a vision of "let's stay in one place, so let's find a way to do it"; it evolved from the gradual application of accumulated practical knowledge under real constraints until eventually it was possible to stay in one place. If Paleoelon had somehow convinced early humanity to abandon hunter-gathering and settle into a sedentary life because he had a vision for new markets around farming it would have led to the earliest famine.

Yes, your description of how farming and sedentary lifestyle progressed is much more accurate than my somewhat clumsy attempt. My intention was to emphasise that such a transformative event in human history did not take place thanks to visionaries going against the grain [0] , but rather through a long and complex process. [0] Well, technically in favour of the grain! Pun not initially intended: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Grain:_A_Deep_Hist...

It's not only about destruction. It's also about reliability. Without proper shielding and error correction you're going to have lots and lots of reliability issues and data corruption. And if we're talking about AI and given the current reliability problems of the Nvidia hardware, plus the radiation, plus the difficulty for refrigerating all that stuff on space... That's a big problem. And we still haven't started to talk about the energy generation. I think there's a very interesting use case on edge computing (edge of space, if you wanna make the joke) that in fact some satellites are already doing, were they preprocess data before sending back to Earth. But datacenter-power-level computing is not even near. I have no idea and numbers to back it up, but I feel it would be even easier to set up a Moon datacenter than an orbital datacenter (when talking about that size of datacenter)

I couldn't believe that was an actual quote from the article. It is. These people are legit insane.

Not insane at all. They are perfectly sane and know words can be twisted to justify just about anything, when stating the actual goals is unsavory.

Context missing. This is in reference to a vision the (distant?) future where the satellites are manufactured in factories on the Moon and sent into space with mass drivers. Full paragraph quote comes from: > While launching AI satellites from Earth is the immediate focus, Starship’s capabilities will also enable operations on other worlds. Thanks to advancements like in-space propellant transfer, Starship will be capable of landing massive amounts of cargo on the Moon. Once there, it will be possible to establish a permanent presence for scientific and manufacturing pursuits. Factories on the Moon can take advantage of lunar resources to manufacture satellites and deploy them further into space. By using an electromagnetic mass driver and lunar manufacturing, it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the Sun’s power. >

That makes much more sense tbh. I believe Musk predicted in 2021 that we would land humans on the moon by 2024 [0]. That obviously has been deprioritized but how many Starships have delivered 50+ tons of payload to the moon so far? [0] https://www.foxbusiness.com/business-leaders/spacex-boss-elo...

Why is it cheaper to ship all of the materials to space, then to the moon for assembly (which also includes shipping all of the people and supplies to keep them alive), then back into space vs just… building them on earth and then shipping them up? We’re not exactly at a loss for land over here.

> which also includes shipping all of the people and supplies to keep them alive) What do you mean, "people" ? I'm pretty sure Musk is only expecting to send self-assembling Optimus robots [1] to do the whole manufacturing. [1] "pre-order now, expected delivery any time soon" (Oh, those times where you try to be sarcastic and realize: "wait, maybe that's the actual plan".)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_resources In situ manufacturing. You just have to send enough to build the thing that builds the factory.

It's not like satellites need anything like computer chips, which are finicky things to build that require parts with a sole supplier on the entire planet.

You can make propellant on the Moon (aluminum based solid fuels), and the energy to get into orbit or into deep space is far, far less that from Earth’s surface.

Why would satellites be manufactured on the moon? There's nothing on the moon. The raw materials would have to be ferried over first. What would be the point?

It would appeal to naive technofetishists, the same crowd of investors enamored by many of Elon's other impossible schemes. The moon mfg makes significantly more sense than the hilarious plan to establish a permanent Mars base in the next 50 years, but that's not saying much.

> Why would satellites be manufactured on the moon? There's nothing on the moon. The raw materials would have to be ferried over first. What would be the point? From lunar regolith you would extract: oxygen, iron, aluminum, titanium, silicon, calcium, and magnesium. From the poles you can get fuel (water ice -> water + hydrogen + oxygen). The real constraint is not materials, but rather power generation, automation reliability, and initial capital investment. So you have to shuttle machines, energy systems, and electronics. The moon can supply mass, oxygen, fuel, and structure. Satellites that would benefit most are: huge comms platforms, space-based power satellites, large radar arrays, deep-space telescopes, etc.

>From lunar regolith you would extract: oxygen, iron, aluminum, titanium, silicon, calcium, and magnesium. Do we actually know how to do that? >From the poles From the poles! So the proposal includes building a planetary-scale railway network on bumpy lunar terrain. >The moon can supply mass, oxygen, fuel, and structure. None of those are things we are hurting for down here, though.

> So the proposal includes building a planetary-scale railway network on bumpy lunar terrain. And that’s from a fascist who barely managed to dig ONE small one lane tunnel under Las Vegas and called it a revolution. I’m sorry to be rude but people who are still giving musk any credit are stupid at this point. Oh boy, IA data centers in space. It’s not only ridiculous, but it’s also boring and not even exciting at all.

Power would almost certainly mostly come from solar panels. The SpaceX-xAI press release mentions using mass drivers which are electrically powered. Could make Hydrogen-Oxygen rocket fuel but not needed in Moon's lower gravity/thin atmosphere.

> The real constraint is not materials It's solvents, lubricants, cooling, and all the other boring industrial components and feedstocks that people seem to forget exist. Just because raw materials exist in lunar regolith doesn't mean much if you can't actually smelt and refine it into useful forms.

Both China and the US are working on building nuclear reactors on the moon, so presumably they see line of sight on those matters? https://spectrum.ieee.org/lunar-nuclear-reactor-nasa-moon

That wasn't the original question. The head of this thread was quoting Musk's claim, which I repeat here: > it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space This is 500-1000 times as much as current global production. Musk is talking about building on the Moon 500-1000 times as much factory capacity as currently exists in aggregate across all of Earth, and launching the products electromagnetically. Given how long PV modules last, that much per year is enough to keep all of Earth's land area paved with contiguous PV. PV doesn't last as long in space, but likewise the Moon would be totally tiled in PV (and much darker as a consequence) at this production rate. In fact, given it does tile the moon, I suspect Musk may have started from "tile moon with PV" and estimated the maximum productive output of that power supply being used to make more PV. I mean, don't get me wrong, in the *long term* I buy that. It's just that by "long term" I mean Musk's likely to have buried (given him, in a cryogenic tube) for decades by the time that happens. Even being optimistic, given the lack of literally any experience building a factory up there and how our lunar mining experience is little more than a dozen people and a handful of rovers picking up interesting looking rocks, versus given how much experience we need down here to get things right, even Musk's organisation skills and ability to enthuse people and raise capital has limits. But these are timescales where those skills don't last (even if he resolves his political toxicity that currently means the next Democrat administration will hate his guts and do what they can to remove most of his power), because he will have died of old age.

The intractable problem is heat dissipation. There is to little matter in space to absorb excess heat. You'd need thermal fins bigger than the solar cells. The satellite's mass would be dominated by the solar panels and heat fins such that maybe 1% of the mass would be usable compute. It would be 1000x easier to leave them on the moon and dissipate into the ground and 100000x easier to just keep making them on earth.

See Dyson Sphere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere

Dyson's paper was literally written in jest.

>In an interview with Robert Wright in 2003, Dyson referred to his paper on the search for Dyson spheres as "a little joke" and commented that "you get to be famous only for the things you don't think are serious" [...] To be fair, he later added this: >in a later interview with students from The University of Edinburgh in 2018, he referred to the premise of the Dyson sphere as being "correct and uncontroversial".[13] In other interviews, while lamenting the naming of the object, Dyson commented that "the idea was a good one", and referred to his contribution to a paper on disassembling planets as a means of constructing one. Sources are in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere

Thanks for pointing out those follow ups. Interesting stuff! > correct and uncontraversial From the original quote it is clear he was referring to the idea of aliens being detectable by infrared because they will absorb all of their sun's energy. Later in the same paragraph he says: > Unfortunately I went on to speculate about possible ways of building a shell, for example by using the mass of Jupiter... > These remarks about building a shell were only order-of-magnitude estimates, but were misunderstood by journalists and science-fiction writers as describing real objects. The essential idea of an advanced civilization emitting infrared radiation was already published by Olaf Stapledon in his science fiction novel Star Maker in 1937. So the Dyson Sphere is a rhetorical vehicle to make an order-of-magnitude estimate, not a description of a thing that he thought could physically exist. Full quote from the video cited before "the idea was a good one": > science fiction writers got hold of this phrase and imagined it then to be a spherical rigid object. And the aliens would be living on some kind of artificial shell. a rigid structure surrounding a star. which wasn't exactly what I had in mind, but then in any case, that's become then a favorite object of science fiction writers. They call it the Dyson sphere, which was a name I don't altogether approve of, but anyway, I mean that's I'm stuck with it. But the idea was a good one. Again he explicitly says this "wasn't exactly what I had in mind." This one hedges a bit more and could be interpreted as his saying the idea of a Dyson Sphere is a good one. He may have meant that in the sense of it being a good science fiction idea though, and he subsequently goes on to talk about that. The Dyson Sphere is good for order-of-magnitude calculations about hypothetical aliens, and also for selling vapourware to the types of people who uncritically think that vapourware is real.

Have you read the paper itself, not just summaries of the idea? It's obvious from the way he wrote it, dripping in sarcasm. Talking about "Malthusian principles" and "Lebensraum", while hand waving away any common sense questions about how the mass of Jupiter would even be smeared into a sphere around the sun, just saying that he can conceive of it and therefore we should spend public money looking for it. He's having a lark. Also, he literally said it was a joke, and was miffed that he was best know for something he didn't take seriously.

Yeah, that's the point ... it's stupid to believe humanity is capable of deploying that much infrastructure. We cannot do even 0.01% of it.

What do you think the limiting factor is? I don't see why we can't scale manufacturing of satellites up as far as we want. If we mine out a substantial fraction of the mass of the earth, we can go harvest asteroids or something.

>> Dyson Sphere > What do you think the limiting factor is? You need to be able to harness enough raw material and energy to build something that can surround the sun. That does not exist in the solar system and we do not yet have the means to travel further out to collect, move, and construct such an incredibly huge structure. It seems like a fantasy.

The inner planets contain enough mass to create a shell of 1 AU radius with mass of 42 kg/m^2. That sounds like a plausible thickness and density for a sandwich of photovoltaics - GPUs - heat sinks. You don't build a rigid shell of course, you build a swarm of free-floating satellites in a range of orbits. See https://www.aleph.se/Nada/dysonFAQ.html#ENOUGH for numbers.

I am dying to know where you’ll get the energy and manufacturing scale in order to achieve this with current, or current+50-years technology. Do tell.

The energy to build the system comes from the partial assembled system, plus some initial bootstrap energy. It grows exponentially. We seem to have enough today to build small factories in orbit. The manufacturing scale comes from designing factory factories. They aren't that far in the future. Most factory machinery is made in factories which could be entirely automated, so you just need some robots to install machines into factories.

I was told ca. 2003 or so that because features on computer chips were getting smaller at some rate, and processor speed was getting faster at some other rate, that given exponential this or that I'd have tiny artificial haemo-goblins[1] bombing around my circulatory system that would make me swim like a fish under the sea for hours on end. But it turned out to be utter bullshit. Just like this. [1] https://www.writingsbyraykurzweil.com/respirocytes

Sure, but if we're talking about solar engineering, that mass is going to be dispersed in orbit around the sun. You're not going to be reaccumulating that any time soon.

Also it's gravitationally unstable, like Dyson Rings, where as soon as you have any perturbance from the center means that the closer side is more attracted to the sun so it enters a feedback loop.

There are only so many people who can make satellites; there are only so many things to make satellites out of; and there are only so many orbits to put them in. There are only so many reasons why a person might want a satellite. There are only so many ways of placing satellites in orbit and each requires some amount of energy, and we have access to a finite amount of energy over time. Finally, if we limited ourselves to earth-based raw materials, we would eventually reach a point where the remaining mass of the earth would have less gravitational effect on the satellite fleet than the fleet itself, which would have deleterious effects on the satellite fleet. Seven reasons are intuitive; I’m sure there are many others.

People can build a factory that makes satellites. And then a factory that makes factories to make satellites. There is plenty of material in the solar system (see my other response), and plenty of orbits, and launch capability can scale with energy harvested so the launch rate can grow exponentially. Lots of people will probably decide they don't want any more satellites. But it only takes a few highly determined people to get it done anyway.

Once you dig up the top kilometer of a planet's crust, what's under your feet? The next kilometer! That would suck to do to Earth, but we can launch all of Mars's mass into the swarm.

After a few decades, you need to start replacing all the solar panels. And the robot army being used to do the construction and resource extraction will likely have a much shorter lifespan. So needs to be self-replicating/repairing/recycling.

But the factory ~~can~~must grow.

Pfft that would just require setting up an entire lunar mineral extraction and refining system larger than we have on earth, just minor details.