alt Hacker NewsHonestly, I think he's spot on, and I normally am not fond of Elon's public behavior. I mentioned in another thread that they're getting around having to ask permission to build datacenters by doing it in space. The entire thing is to avoid NIMBY stuff I'd bet.
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It would be orders of magnitude cheaper to buy up islands and space in countries that don't care, and then find ways to connect them to the required infrastructure, than it would be to build them in space.
Hell, it would be cheaper to figure out how to build them on the ocean.
How do you cool them?
https://www.chaotropy.com/why-jeff-bezos-is-probably-wrong-p...
You can build a completely self-powered (and water-free) datacenter in the middle of nowhere for far cheaper than the satellite version. The NIMBY factor isn't so powerful as to keep datacenters off entire continents. Going to space for that is very stupid.
Building datacenters in a medium where the main waste product (heat) is incredibly difficult to get rid of, there is zero opportunity for maintainance, and the fuel to get to site costs more than the site does. Makes perfect sense, spot on!
The model 3 was Elons last great idea (if it was even his). Since then, he has been wrong pretty much about everything.
Its to the point where anything he says is guaranteed to be wrong just on the merit that its coming out of his mouth.
It really depends on scale. There will be enough terrestrial vetoes that if what we build is 10-1000x what people are already halting through legal challenges…