Have you chatted with Ai about the economics of space vs terrestrial?
Even if you believe they can get cost to launch 1KG down to 100 bucks... (current falcon heavy is $1550) you still have the problem with all those solar panels.
1GW of space AI requires... 1 GW of solar to power it.
Current manufacturers of space solar is 1-2 MW &.. space solar aint cheap. $100 per watt. They estimate each spacex will be 250 kW. So.. $25M just for the solar for each satellite. Yeah you can use less efficient / cheaper solar, but then your weight goes up.
Also... Ground AI datacenters haven't nailed down how quickly GPUs depreciate. Accountants claim 6 years while CRWV says it's longer and most realists say it's shorter. It's based on how quickly GPUs will improve. Which is QUICKLY.
In space you'll have to depreciate GPU, all supporting hardware including the satellite, electronics, solar panels, and launch costs. On the ground it's just the GPU & you can even sell the old one down.
ground based AI needs power. $FRVO is an interesting ticker if you believe in their technology. Just announced a deal with google yesterday.
It isn't going to be easy, of course. Yet, I do believe they will make it work.
One correction: SpaceX makes their own solar arrays. The cost is nowhere near what you quoted. Source: I worked for SpaceX for a few years.
Also, you can generate a lot more power in space per unit area due to not having the limitations created by our atmosphere and weather. It's continuous generation at 30 to 40 percent higher per-unit-area radiation. Generation on earth is roughly an inverted parabola (on a good day without clouds and weather) that, at best, if you integrate the area under the power curve, delivers 66% of the total equivalent energy say, a nuclear reactor, could deliver during the same period. So, once you increase radiation from about 1,000 W/m2 (impossible to achieve on earth due to weather and other realities) to 1,400 W/m2, 24/7, no weather, etc. The scenario quickly becomes vastly different.
Geothermal is very interesting, thanks for the ticker, I'll look into it.
All that said, I think the US (and Europe, if they care to survive) needs to have, as a top national priority, a massive program for the construction of nuclear power plants.
A few years ago, I ran through an analysis of power generation needs to convert our entire fleet of vehicles to electric power. That required at least doubling our power generation capacity. This was the equivalent of having to build 1,200 nuclear power plants, each producing 1 GW 24/7.
This is impossible to achieve with solar, or wind, or the combination.
So, even if we decide not to care one bit about AI data centers, we need to double our power generation capacity (and infrastructure to deliver it).
Add AI data centers to that equation and the number could easily climb another 600 nuclear power plants.
Here's the problem that a naïve conversation with an LLM will not uncover: Humanity and Politics.
Could we embark on such a massive energy-generation project? Yes, absolutely.
Is it realistic? Nope. Not even close.
In other words, we can do it but it is impossible...which sounds like an oxymoron until you consider that we have lots of examples of projects that are absolutely plausible that, once they contact political and government reality, quickly become impossible. The best-worst example I always grab is the California high speed train disaster.
How do we get Earth back to something resembling the steady state we know can work long term?
1. Electrify almost everything that can reasonably be electrified.
Move quickly to EVs, and replace anything that can practically become electric with an electric version. Self driving & fleet utilization will push transportation cost per mile lower than ever before.
For the power grid, data centers, and other large 24/7 consumers: solar + wind + battery storage. Deep geothermal also looks interesting.
Build lots of desalination capacity.
Maybe even planes can eventually be electrified. Imagine shorter hops with battery swaps at sea (aircraft carrier sorts of things). Too crazy?
2. Deal with the things that are much harder to electrify.
Cargo ships.
Long haul aviation, if the electric plane idea really is impractical.
For those, we can turn energy + CO2 into liquid fuels, creating something closer to a closed carbon cycle.
3. Remove excess CO2.
CO2 persists in the climate system for 200+ years, so getting emissions to zero does not necessarily return atmospheric CO2 to previous levels.
We will need to remove enough to be net negative & over time bring it back down to the CO2 levels we know worked long term.
That takes energy. Fortunately, solar + wind + storage are cheap enough now & getting cheaper.
4. Find places for all that solar.
Deserts are obvious.
Floating solar could potentially contribute.
Agricultural land is interesting too. Agrivoltaics can sometimes provide useful shading while still allowing crops to grow.
5. Deal with the transition period.
Once we are making a serious transition toward decarbonization and carbon removal, it may make sense to investigate temporary solar geoengineering, such as injecting reflective aerosols into the stratosphere, to partially counteract warming while atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are being brought down.
The purpose would be to stop the feedback loops such as more forest fires, thawing permafrost, and loss of ice and other reflective surfaces.
Obviously geoengineering has major risks and should not substitute for reducing emissions. But as a temporary bridge, it seems like something that deserves serious research.
We can do all this.
None of it requires magic. We already have, or can plausibly engineer, most of the pieces.
> 2. Deal with the things that are much harder to electrify.
What about wars? Unlikely anyone would completely electrify their armies anytime soon, and that blocks even starting the transition in the rest of economy. Some drones are electric, but you still need to move heavy stuff and many people in denied environments, and stationary electric grids are still more vulnerable than liquid fuels.
This all sounds good, but the Government of one of the world's primary super powers (The United States) is currently unwilling to participate in fighting climate change, so any plan seems DOA without a major policy change on that front.
Agreed, and also Moscow sees this as a huge positive change. More ice-free ports, more arable land, plus avoiding action means they get to keep selling their major export.
Europe is now really stuck between two huge enemies, regarding climate. We can do a lot to prepare, we just need to wake tf up.
Our Union gives us many advantages. We just need to use it before our enemies destroy it.
Yep, unfortunately the only fix would be a world government. But that will never happen. So everyone's going to reach for a bigger slice of pie at any expense no matter what happens, no matter how clear the evidence is. (I'm not necessarily saying a world government is a good idea, but it's the only way to solve climate change that I can see)
We've known what to do for a couple of decades now. But when the world's largest economy is run by a madman who just cares about lining his and his buddies pockets instead of the future of humanity, it's hard to make progress.
That video is quite biased. Just tell your clanker to critique it. It will point out that those numbers are quite cherry picked, and leaving out important details. E.g. the „GHG would reduce by only 2.6%“ study assumes that all crop production stays the same, which doesn’t make any sense.
Why no mention of increasing biomass of earth? It’s the living systems that buffer the chemical and energetic changes of the climate, and whether or not we can take back the carbon we’ve aerosolized, we can repair ecosystems and slow down changes in weather.
this tech bro utopia ALWAYS ignores relatively basic solutions. A great example is reliable, regular, and efficient public transit. We don't need self driving cars and all that mumbo jumbo. A bloody train, tram or a bus would solve most of these problems.
This! I live in Western Europe and have never owned a car. I mostly travel by public transport or bike. I rent a car about once a year, but could do without that as well. Before people tell me that I am an exception: I know other people like me in various other places in Europe! It is possible and actually good for your body to have to move, at least to the train station, carrying groceries etc.
>This! I live in Western Europe and have never owned a car.
I'm also in Western Europe and almost always needed a car for my commutes to work, unless I was willing to accept a 1-2+ h public transport commute each way, because tech employers where I live love locating their offices in the sticks where land is cheap because they're broke and cheap, and the city hasn't significantly updated public transport infrastructure in ~30 years, but the population and size of the metro area grew by like 3x.
>Before people tell me that I am an exception: I know other people like me in various other places in Europe!
The thing is, Western Europe is not a country, but a collection of various countries with various economies, cities, and infrastructure, and various people with various housing and career locations, some close and well connected to public transport, some not at all, and from my circle of acquaintances, yes, you are the exception, as most people I know get to work by car.
So, you can't possibly throw such blanket statement over everyone in Western Europe, unless you're massively obtuse or living in a bubble without realizing it.
Like, I'm sure most people in Munich, Paris, London, Madrid, Vienna, etc can easily get to work on the excellent public transport they have, but I don't live there and don't have such amazing public transport, so then car it is for us.
>It is possible and actually good for your body to have to move, at least to the train station, carrying groceries etc.
Bruh, I only need a car just to get to work in reasonable time, not to move or carry groceries.
I get my groceries from the supermarkets 5-10 minute walking distance to my place, but I don't have the luxury of employment jobs within the same distance, so car it is, unless I want to be wasting my life switching connections between slow and infrequent trams, busses and trains which often suffer delays.
And regarding the "body movement" as a pro for public transport, I'd rather have more free time to move in gym and to the workouts my body condition needs, rather than waste my time walking and sitting/standing on public transport, as that's not an actual workout but a waste of time, as all you can do is browse HN on the phone with the hand that's not grabbing the bar. Driving is also a waste of time, but at least it saves me almost 1 hour each way which is massive time save that I can use how I like.
It goes through periods of slow change and periods of rapid change, with regional variations. That will never change. The climate cannot be controlled precisely by humans. To think otherwise is just a comforting lie people tell themselves.
The vast majority of people concerned about climate change think there is some paradise we could have kept if only we hadn't been so "climate-sinful". It's uncomfortable to contemplate that the world is changing uncontrollably around you.
Wow dude. I'll just assume you genuinely don't understand this... So the TL;DR is that except for events like supervolcanoes and dinosaur-killing asteroids, no it does not go through periods of change that are this rapid.
You might be misled because you can find graphs of global average temperate that swing wildly by like 10C-20C. But look at the X axis, it's in hundreds of millions of years. Stretch it out to 100k years and it will look perfectly flat.
And yes there is some climate paradise we could have kept it we hadn't emitted so much CO2. The one where it isn't 50C in Baghdad and Europe isn't a dust bowl. Could we have kept it for 100 million years? Maybe not! But nobody is saying that. We could have kept it for 100k years, instead of like 100.
It's comforting to imagine it isn't a problem - both from an "I'm smarter than everyone else" perspective and "I don't have to worry about it", but you're lying to yourself. I dunno lots of people are happy to lie to themselves (at least 50% of religious people I reckon) but I can't do it.
I live in Portugal, near Lisbon (not in Lisbon, as it has become impossible to afford for locals, even tech workers). Many times it would be cheaper for me to travel by plane to a city like London, than the gas+tolls cost to visit my family that live less than 1h away by car. It takes ~2h30 minimum by public transport.
I find it pretty ridiculous how the carbon taxing is extremely heavy on cars, but pretty much non-existing for air travel here. Tourism is a terrible industry that doesn't even contribute that much to our economy, depletes the housing stock, and removes local businesses and culture, but the tourists are always prioritized by government.
> Tourism is a terrible industry that doesn't even contribute that much to our economy
Portugal is heavily dependent on tourism: it's 10% of the GDP. In the EU not even France is that high: Spain is higher but Portugal's economy definitely depends on tourism.
When stats says: "10% is tourism, 40% is services", if you remove the 10% linked to tourism, the services economy does crash too. And so does the 20% that is "construction": a part of that is second effects from tourism.
You can't just say: "We'll just remove 10% of our GDP and we'll be fine". Firstly even at "only" 10% you'd be totally screwed and then anyway the actual number would be much higher.
Good! I don't consider myself a Nazi and so I'm happy a big, influential tech company refuses to business with a man who does the Nazi salute on television.
Hopefully Huang will ask for tariffs on solar panels & batteries to be lifted. After several years of tariffs, there is no American solar panel industry anywhere near as good as China's. Open the floodgates & reap clean, silent energy at 5-6 cents per kWh. There's plenty of land for those panels.
People seriously need to value this thing realistically. Otherwise we are handing the money required over to a raging narcissist who plans to launch hundreds and thousands of rockets, each one burning KEROSENE or methane... For what? Live on mars? Aykm? Starlink? Nifty but I get unlimited 5g 300 Mbps unlimited for 8 euros a month. And does starlink work inside? What else? Does nobody else see it as kind of strange that humans with all of our technology still have not figured out a better way to power a rocket with kerosene or methane? And we're powering the most cutting edge computing AI using.... Fossil fuels.
Even if you believe they can get cost to launch 1KG down to 100 bucks... (current falcon heavy is $1550) you still have the problem with all those solar panels.
1GW of space AI requires... 1 GW of solar to power it.
Current manufacturers of space solar is 1-2 MW &.. space solar aint cheap. $100 per watt. They estimate each spacex will be 250 kW. So.. $25M just for the solar for each satellite. Yeah you can use less efficient / cheaper solar, but then your weight goes up.
Also... Ground AI datacenters haven't nailed down how quickly GPUs depreciate. Accountants claim 6 years while CRWV says it's longer and most realists say it's shorter. It's based on how quickly GPUs will improve. Which is QUICKLY.
In space you'll have to depreciate GPU, all supporting hardware including the satellite, electronics, solar panels, and launch costs. On the ground it's just the GPU & you can even sell the old one down.
ground based AI needs power. $FRVO is an interesting ticker if you believe in their technology. Just announced a deal with google yesterday.
reply