Elon’s satellite plan is a fascinating earthbound workaround designed to comply within present day government imposed constraints - but aside from latency and Chi-com targeting issues, it would only work within our Goldilocks zone.
On Mars? Not so much.
“Advanced nuclear faces regulatory inertia.” Until it doesn’t.
Hypothetical long term operations on Mars, Titan, or Pluto - would almost assuredly begin with deploying advanced nuclear SMR’s to their respective surfaces.
Yes, but. “And it bets that human ingenuity, when disciplined by mass and watts and kg, can open a new frontier of abundance.” Abundance of what? More computing power? How does this service human existence?
We'll still need the ground sites: the starlink model calls for a short lifecycle, distributed platform of small compute modules in relatively low orbit. Data storage should be primarily terrestrial. Obsolete modules will likely be retired by de-orbit, and cheap boost price will enable constant replacement. Ground-based sections will still need power and cooling.
Imagine if the orbital modules can transmit energy, along with bits.
Elon Musk is once again dragging the future forward by the collar. With Elon Musk and SpaceX, orbit stops being sci-fi and starts looking like infrastructure. The bottleneck for AI is not talent. It is power, land, and politics. If Starship makes mass to orbit cheap and repeatable, solar-rich space becomes a parallel grid. That reframes the debate. Instead of fighting zoning boards, you balance watts, heat, and kilograms. The real question is not whether it sounds bold. It is whether competitors can match the integration of rockets, silicon, and vision. If they cannot, Musk owns the next layer of civilization.
Mr. Muse, there's one more factor I didn't see mentioned: communication. Somehow, that raw data has to go up, get turned into information, and then transmitted back down to where the planet can use it. This has two components, bandwidth, which is a function of frequencies and number of channels, and latency, which is a function of distance. Mr Musk may have solved the bandwidth issue with Starlink, which can provide repeaters to move the data back and forth. However, 186000 mph is a hard upper limit on transmission speed and thus latency, and if you're putting your data centers further out to take advantage of the Sun, that works against solving it by moving closer.
Elon’s satellite plan is a fascinating earthbound workaround designed to comply within present day government imposed constraints - but aside from latency and Chi-com targeting issues, it would only work within our Goldilocks zone.
On Mars? Not so much.
“Advanced nuclear faces regulatory inertia.” Until it doesn’t.
Hypothetical long term operations on Mars, Titan, or Pluto - would almost assuredly begin with deploying advanced nuclear SMR’s to their respective surfaces.
Yes, but. “And it bets that human ingenuity, when disciplined by mass and watts and kg, can open a new frontier of abundance.” Abundance of what? More computing power? How does this service human existence?
We'll still need the ground sites: the starlink model calls for a short lifecycle, distributed platform of small compute modules in relatively low orbit. Data storage should be primarily terrestrial. Obsolete modules will likely be retired by de-orbit, and cheap boost price will enable constant replacement. Ground-based sections will still need power and cooling.
Imagine if the orbital modules can transmit energy, along with bits.
Elon Musk is once again dragging the future forward by the collar. With Elon Musk and SpaceX, orbit stops being sci-fi and starts looking like infrastructure. The bottleneck for AI is not talent. It is power, land, and politics. If Starship makes mass to orbit cheap and repeatable, solar-rich space becomes a parallel grid. That reframes the debate. Instead of fighting zoning boards, you balance watts, heat, and kilograms. The real question is not whether it sounds bold. It is whether competitors can match the integration of rockets, silicon, and vision. If they cannot, Musk owns the next layer of civilization.
It's great to share the planet with Elon and watch him dream and build.
Mr. Muse, there's one more factor I didn't see mentioned: communication. Somehow, that raw data has to go up, get turned into information, and then transmitted back down to where the planet can use it. This has two components, bandwidth, which is a function of frequencies and number of channels, and latency, which is a function of distance. Mr Musk may have solved the bandwidth issue with Starlink, which can provide repeaters to move the data back and forth. However, 186000 mph is a hard upper limit on transmission speed and thus latency, and if you're putting your data centers further out to take advantage of the Sun, that works against solving it by moving closer.
Google’s Cloud wasn’t really in a cloud. For all his quirks, Musk is a bona fide genius.
Elon Musk always thinks outside of the box. Genius.