We also shouldn't overlook the fact that the proposal entirely glosses over the implication of the alternative benefits we might realize if humanity achieved the incredible engineering and technical capacity necessary to make this version of space AI happen.

Think about it. Elon conjures up a vision of the future where we've managed to increase our solar cell manufacturing capacity by two whole orders of magnitude and have the space launch capability for all of it along with tons and tons of other stuff and the best he comes up with is...GPUs in orbit?

This is essentially the superhero gadget technology problem, where comic books and movies gloss over the the civilization changing implications of some technology the hero invents to punch bad guys harder. Don't get me wrong, the idea of orbiting data centers is kind of cool if we can pull it off. But being able to pull if off implies an ability to do a lot more interesting things. The problem is that this is both wildly overambitious and somehow incredibly myopic at the same time.

Only people who never interacted with data center reliability think it's doable to maintain servers with no human intervention.

I couldn't believe that was an actual quote from the article. It is.

These people are legit insane.

> We currently make around 1 TW of photovoltaic cells per year, globally.

Doubling every three years; at that rate it would take about 30 years for 1TW to become 1000TW. Whether on not the trend continues largely depends on demand, but as of right now humanity seems to have an insatiable demand for power.

In fairness, solar cells can be about 5x more efficient in space (irradiance, uptime).

Doesn't this risk some unforeseen effects on Earth or the rest of the solar system at that scale? Disruption of magnetic shield, some not yet known law of physics suddenly getting felt etc.?

> 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.

This is all based on bad math. The people proposing these things don't even have proper scientific and mathematical training to determine what is achievable.

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. >

Is there a credible way to cool a space-based data center on that scale?

We will have cyber taxis and FSD 100% next year.

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

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

Help me understand something. We make 1 TW of cells per year but we're struggling with bringing 1 GW consuming data centers online?

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