What do you think the limiting factor is? I don't see why we can't scale manufacturing of satellites up as far as we want. If we mine out a substantial fraction of the mass of the earth, we can go harvest asteroids or something.
You need to be able to harness enough raw material and energy to build something that can surround the sun. That does not exist in the solar system and we do not yet have the means to travel further out to collect, move, and construct such an incredibly huge structure. It seems like a fantasy.
The inner planets contain enough mass to create a shell of 1 AU radius with mass of 42 kg/m^2. That sounds like a plausible thickness and density for a sandwich of photovoltaics - GPUs - heat sinks.
You don't build a rigid shell of course, you build a swarm of free-floating satellites in a range of orbits.
The energy to build the system comes from the partial assembled system, plus some initial bootstrap energy. It grows exponentially. We seem to have enough today to build small factories in orbit.
The manufacturing scale comes from designing factory factories. They aren't that far in the future. Most factory machinery is made in factories which could be entirely automated, so you just need some robots to install machines into factories.
I was told ca. 2003 or so that because features on computer chips were getting smaller at some rate, and processor speed was getting faster at some other rate, that given exponential this or that I'd have tiny artificial haemo-goblins[1] bombing around my circulatory system that would make me swim like a fish under the sea for hours on end. But it turned out to be utter bullshit. Just like this.
Great. Now run the numbers to find the energy required to disassemble the planets and accelerating the pieces to their desired locations. For reference, it takes over 10 times of propellant and oxidant mass to put something in LEO.
The burned propellant and oxygen mass (as H2O and CO2) almost all ends up back in the atmosphere when you launch to LEO, so you can keep running electrolysis (powered by solar) to convert it back to fuel.
Sure, but if we're talking about solar engineering, that mass is going to be dispersed in orbit around the sun. You're not going to be reaccumulating that any time soon.
Also it's gravitationally unstable, like Dyson Rings, where as soon as you have any perturbance from the center means that the closer side is more attracted to the sun so it enters a feedback loop.
There are only so many people who can make satellites; there are only so many things to make satellites out of; and there are only so many orbits to put them in. There are only so many reasons why a person might want a satellite. There are only so many ways of placing satellites in orbit and each requires some amount of energy, and we have access to a finite amount of energy over time.
Finally, if we limited ourselves to earth-based raw materials, we would eventually reach a point where the remaining mass of the earth would have less gravitational effect on the satellite fleet than the fleet itself, which would have deleterious effects on the satellite fleet.
Seven reasons are intuitive; I’m sure there are many others.
People can build a factory that makes satellites. And then a factory that makes factories to make satellites.
There is plenty of material in the solar system (see my other response), and plenty of orbits, and launch capability can scale with energy harvested so the launch rate can grow exponentially.
Lots of people will probably decide they don't want any more satellites. But it only takes a few highly determined people to get it done anyway.
> Finally, if we limited ourselves to earth-based raw materials, we would eventually reach a point where the remaining mass of the earth would have less gravitational effect on the satellite fleet than the fleet itself, which would have deleterious effects on the satellite fleet.
The Earth's crust has an average thickness of about 15-20 km.
Practically we can only get at maybe the top 1-2 km, as drill bits start to fail the deeper you go.
The Earth's radius is 6,371 km.
So even if we could somehow dug up entire crust we can get to and flung it into orbit, that would barely be noticeable to anything in orbit.
Yeah, but besides not having the physical amount of material available in the solar system, or the availability of any technology to transfer power generated to a destination where it can serve a meaningful purpose in the foreseeable future, or having the political climate or capital necessary for even initiating such an effort, or not being able to do so without severely kneecapping the habitability of our planet, there are aren't really any meaningful barriers that I can see.
> What do you think the limiting factor is? I don't see why we can't scale manufacturing of satellites up as far as we want.
A reason. I'm sure that theoretically it's possible, assuming infinite money and an interest to do so. But literally, why would we? There's no practical ways to get the power back on earth, it's cheaper to build a solar field, etc.
And I don't believe datacenters in space are viable, cost wise. Not until we can no longer fit them on earth, AND demand is still increasing.
After a few decades, you need to start replacing all the solar panels.
And the robot army being used to do the construction and resource extraction will likely have a much shorter lifespan. So needs to be self-replicating/repairing/recycling.
If you set Time Machine to use encrypted backups, it will create a fake disk that's really a directory tree with a bunch of gigabyte-sized binary chunks. This is safer because it doesn't require the file system to support anything fancy like symlinks or case-insensitive unicode file names. One downside is that restoring to anything other than a Mac is nontrivial.
This 100% - it’s funny how it’s actually more reliable in my experience to use the encrypted sparse bundle. I can sling it over to my NAS no problem. I’ve restored from one and everything was perfectly fine. YMMV of course
That was my experience at first, but then it gets corrupted somehow and you have to delete it and start over. Happened to me multiple times with RAID 1, so pretty sure it's a software error -- I eventually just gave up.
Deleting data according to a pre-defined schedule (often 90 days) is legitimate and standard. It's good that agencies do this, to limit exposure due to data breaches. And it's normal for courts to issue a preservation order for specific data relevant to a potential case.
It'd be better if the courts could actually deal with the case now instead of in 1-5 years, but alas.
> This chart includes categories for how long video is kept if it does not contain evidence of a crime [emphasis added]
So yes, some things are short (I did write "usually" for a reason), but even your link doesn't claim that video of a killing would be deleted in 90 days. It's evidence, 90 days would be ridiculously short for retaining evidence.
Even for people who don't think the ICE agents committed a crime, the ICE agents and DHS have claimed that this was the outcome from actions by a "domestic terrorist" which certainly makes it evidence of a crime from their own perspective.
I think the PG designers would be surprised by the claim that it wasn't designed for this. Database designers try very hard to support the widest possible range of uses.
If all queue actions are failing instantly, you probably want a separate throttle to not remove them from the Kafka queue, since you'd rather keep them there and resume processing them normally instead of from the DLQ when queue processing is working again. In fact, the rate limit implicitly enforced by adding failure records to the DLQ helps with this.
All of which is arguably true, but misses the point that uploading your age verification documents to every social media site you might want to look at is very likely to result in them getting hacked and leaked.
Working with startups, I've signed up for 100s of sites. My password manager lists 550. Those signups are currently low-risk: just my email (already widely public) and a random password. But it would put a big chill on my work if I had to upload government age verification docs to each one.
At the speeds we're familiar with, basketballs and golf balls have elastic collisions. At orbital speeds, satellites are nearly inelastic. So fragment exit velocities lie between the two initial velocities, kv1 + (1-k)v2 for some k that depends on where each fragment came from. If they're colliding, the velocities must be somewhat different, so the weighted average speed has to be lower than orbital speed. So fragments usually don't survive many orbits.
Very well put. It also seems like there's a limit to how bad Kessler syndrome can get. The more debris there is the more collisions, but the more collisions the quicker the debris collides with itself and de-orbits.
That's what I was thinking, Kessler syndrome should be impossible for objects in LEO since all debris orbits decay rapidly (probably 99.9% enter the atmosphere and burn up in minutes, the rest in hours)
Possibly. But more likely the thrust from escaping gas will push it in a direction to either slow the orbit down or make it more eccentric and unstable.
Right, if there's something like a small hole in a pressure tank, it's very unlikely to be aligned exactly with the CG, so the tank will spin around and the net thrust will be near zero.
If a pressure tank splits in half, both halves will fly away but that's a very inefficient way of using the energy in the gas, so the added velocity will be a small fraction of the speed of sound in the gas, which is 1/6 of orbital speed for hydrogen, less for any other gas.
You can't really get much of a chemical explosion because the fuel and oxidizer both disperse very quickly in space.
You could launch some missiles, blow a few satellites into smithereens, and gradually over the next few months they would take out the others. That's a poor kind of war weapon. An effective weapon is one where you can inflict damage continuously, and are able to stop immediately upon some concession. If you can't offer to stop in return for concessions, you won't get any.
Its not really that easy, to cause such a chain reaction, specially if the other person reacts.
And its also really expensive, each sat you take down costs you far more then what you hit. So unless you can actually cause a chain reaction its a losing proposition.
Not really. That’s more science fiction than reality. You should try some Kerbal Space Program and explore how orbits are affected by thrust = collisions, in different directions.
As soon as a satellite is hit the rest of the fleet can start thrusting and raise their orbits to create a clear separation to the debris field.
Following such an attack the rest of the fleet would of course spread out across orbital heights and planes to minimize the potential damage done by each hit, leading to maximum cost for the adversary to do any damage. Rather than like today where the orbits are optimized for ease of management and highest possible bandwidth.
If you're copying from another painting, you don't paint a figure and then decide to move it a centimeter to the left. But original paintings often have such changes.
No one will ever agree on when AI systems have equivalent functionality to a human brain. But lots of jobs consist of things a computer can now do for less than 100W.
Also, while a body itself uses only 100W, a normal urban lifestyle uses a few thousand watts for heat, light, cooking, and transportation.
> Also, while a body itself uses only 100W, a normal urban lifestyle uses a few thousand watts for heat, light, cooking, and transportation.
Add to that the tier-n dependencies this urban lifestyle has—massive supply chains sprawling across the planet, for example involving thousands upon thousands of people and goods involved in making your morning coffee happen.
Wikipedia quoted global primary energy production at 19.6 TW, or about 2400W/person. Which is obviously not even close to equally distributed. Per-country it gets complicated quickly, but naively taking the total from [1] brings the US to 9kW per person.
And that's ignoring sources like food from agriculture, including the food we feed our food.
To be fair, AI servers also use a lot more energy than their raw power demand if we use the same metrics. But after accounting for everything, an American and an 8xH100 server might end up in about the same ballpark
Which is not meant as an argument for replacing Americans with AI servers, but it puts AI power demand into context
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