Summarizer

>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.

Building nuclear-powered and solar powered datacenters in places with low population density will still be cheaper. Do you think Mongolian government won't allow China to build datacenters if the price is right?

Nope, it's 100% about building the stock valuation of SpaceX for an IPO in the face of significant risk from a cold war its CEO started on X with the U.S. federal government and increasing competition from Blue Origin, Quinfan and Guowang. DOD will play Bedrock vs Grok until there is feature parity and then make a decision not based on the features. Disclaimer: Not an Elon hater, but far from a sycophant, similar to how I felt about Steve Jobs for 40+ years.

Exactly; most of the world's problems are political problems. Which Musk has no intention to fix, of course, because he's more about money and (buying) status with it. He had an opportunity but decided to aid the regime in extracting people's data instead (probably selling it to adversaries).

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

From an engineering perspective, with today’s costs, yes. But don’t forget the political complications of dealing with all those countries that own the Sahara, that’s going to come at it’s own cost.

So now we get the political complications of dealing with all those countries that own ASAT weapons.

> We currently make around 1 TW of photovoltaic cells per year, globally. China made 1.8 TW of solar cells in 2025. The raw materials required to make these are incredibly abundant, we make as much as we need.

you would need 200 times the number of solar cells. I don't think you appreciate the scale that 200x is, especially when China is already: 1. quite good at making solar cells 2. quite motivated to increase their energy production via solar

I agree that part of the bottleneck is deploying solar physically. China is the best in the world in deploying solar panels. They are only managing linear increases in their solar capacity, year over year.

Who is “we”? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong_space_station

What you don't want to live near the newest poisonous abomination that the whiz kids dreamt up? Do you want China to take over America or something?