lemmydividebyzeroDatacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea.
My question is always how the hell are you going to cool them. Do you know hard it is to move heat in a vacuum?
fallaciousBasisA radiator. Next question?
What’s going to be performing convection to dissipate heat from the radiator in a manner to support the heat generated by an AI data center?
What part of radiator don’t you understand?
Tell me you don’t know how radiators actually work without telling me. They dissipate heat via convection through the air surrounding them or gasses in general. What does space lack a significant amount of?
Yeah so there is some confusion here. The are radiators on cars or in houses, but those are more accurately heat exchangers. Then there are things like heat lamps, which are really IR radiators that convert electricity to infrared light that feels hot.
Most of the heat you feel at a camp fire is radiant from the flame, unless you are down wind and feeling some convective heat, but most of that heat goes straight up with the smoke.
There’s a difference certainly but do you think the people who seem to be floating this idea know the difference?
Hard to say, but they’ve been using resistive cooling In space a long time.
Also a tech ingredients made a neat video about building one and radiating heat out into space from the ground. It was cool to see what happened when it was cloudy and stopped working.
Radiative cooling is all you got in space.