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So like I don't get to use my degree except to tutor kids and answer physics questions and the like, so indulge me for a second because this doesn't make much sense to me. So like the endgame is to create a new Pryor, OK facility in space, right? It doesn't make sense if we're not shipping something that's about the same as what you can build on Earth.

Epoch.AI says that this facility has 100,000 TPU chips, eats 370 megawatts of electricity, but designed to get rid of up to 480 megawatts of heat. Sun power is 1.36 kW/m^2, which is something like 7 megawatts per football field (assuming ~5000 m^2), but you have to put up something like 3-5x that because solar panels are only 20-30% efficient, right? Assume that you can arrange it so that the solar panels are one side, the radiators on the other, you can maybe get away with only 300-400 football fields maybe? So like 1.5 million m^2 or 1.2 km wide, right? At LEO, 650 km, you have (1.2km)/(650 km) * 180 degrees/pi is 0.11 degrees or 6.6 arcminutes of visual size. The moon is only like 30 arcminutes. And the paper talks about how they're going to not do one big monolithic construction but an oval of fridge-sized objects separated out 2-3 times this size -- so like I don't see how you get another Pryor, OK size data center in LEO without basically having it look like a second, smaller moon flying across the sky 10 times per day.

And if this were a wildly successful idea are we talking about having like 5-10 of them, a few for each big frontier lab? This just sounds like we're talking about the most profound shift to our night skies since we started having to deal with light pollution in our cities.

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