As someone with actual experience working in datacenters, this shit needs constant maintenance and repair. You can't afford to pay for my travel expenses to reboot a server.
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
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You can't reboot a server remotely? My vast experience having been in one collocation once made me think that surely in big datacentres each server has a remotely controllable switch on its power source, like something that comes integrated with the rack itself? Is that not a thing?
You can't remotely replace hardware.
Did I say "replace"? Oh, sorry, I meant "reboot". Must have been distracted when I typed that. Silly me.
There's a bunch of sealed underwater data centres and they found reliability went right up (see Project Natick). Underwater has the benefit of actually having cooling though ..
Yet Microsoft abandoned the idea because it was so fraught with commercialisation issues. Which is exactly what the experts are saying
Can't maintain, can't upgrade, can't repair, it pollutes the environment with abandoned shit and it doesn't scale
Reliability probably went up because of the extra expense put into making sure it won't immediately fail and need to be repaired
I'm not saying the space data centres are a good or even viable idea, just saying you can improve the reliability significantly if you try. The space data centre planis a non starter, there's nowhere for the heat to go.
Yes, investing in reliability will increase reliability
You can radiate the heat with a biiiig long radiator but it doesn't solve any of the other problems or improve commercial scalability
You may note that this thread is talking about data centre reliability ..
Also you can't radiate heat in space ..
You can ONLY radiate heat in space..
Right, I'm sure the hard radiation will help with that as well.
My new supervisor, the day I met him, was talking about how space data centers are a great idea ("because it's so cold up there!") and will be amazing when they're online. That's the moment I realized he was breathtakingly stupid. He may not believe in thermodynamics, but thermodynamics believes in him.
I guess I shouldn't have expected much given that he has a degree in finance and has worked in consulting for 10 years.
I felt exactly the same way about Elon Musk back in 2018(?) when he went on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and said the easiest way to terraform Mars was to just nuke the polar ice caps...and voila...instant atmosphere.
I don't think I've ever palm-slapped my forehead that hard in my life. All of a sudden I knew he was just another fuckin' moron with way too much money to burn.
Mars doesn't even have a magnetosphere, any atmosphere you create would fuck right off into space
If you make it fast enough it will stick around for a while. "A while" in planetary terms can be a few hundred thousand or million years. So it's possible you could produce sufficient atmosphere to make it breathable, and it would remain so for longer than human civilization up to now. Of course, by possible, I mean with the right tools and the resources to support that, which would be substantial. Feel free to find out how many comets you would have to impact into Mars to get that.
And even if it worked (and it would take a LOT of nukes to work) ... well, congrats: now Mars has an atmosphere -- a highly radioactive atmosphere.
Thanks to Mars's lack of a magnetic field, high radiation levels are already a concern. Adding even more radiation into the mix really isn't going to help any of your terraforming goals.
And that's why we should just drop a few million cockroaches on Mars and let them figure it out! /s
Great. And now a few years later, Earth is being invaded by highly advanced mutant cockroaches from Mars.
A person of culture! Kookiburi!
He has no imagination, at least in any way that matters.
What I'd like to see is what would happen if thermonuclear devices were detonated at or very near the core, directionally like a shaped charge to get the core a bit hotter but more importantly moving faster. What impact would that have on the magnetic field of the planet?
Isn't that the plot of the movie, "The Core"?
I've successfully avoided that movie so far so I don't know 😆
You have to see it at least once. It's one of those, "So bad it's nearly good", movies.
If you like yelling at your screen, I recommend.
I think you may either be overestimating the effectiveness of nukes or underestimating the thickness of planets.
Project Plowshare envisioned using nukes to dig holes on the order of hundreds of meters, not thousands of kilometers.
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He may not believe in thermodynamics
How does thermodynamics make this a bad idea? Is it because the heat generated can't escape?
That and the fact that space is not just extremely cold but also extremely hot, depending on what's between the subject and the sun.
Yeah. The only way to cool things in space is to radiate it away with fins, or the more destructive approach of jettisoning material.
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Everyone hyped on AI data centers is forgetting there's no air in space with which to conduct the heat away. A comparatively "tepid" human body could take over 24 hours to freeze solid in space because the only option is for the heat to radiate.
Than there's the part where disposable rockets and satellites like starlink are literally destroying the ozone CFC style.
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Never heard of this. But even if you could connect to them, how would you cool it?
Edit: never mind, that's exactly what the article is about.
Meanwhile China already has data centers in the ocean. Almost anything they do you can bet it's a good idea [economically] because they're not at the point to where they can waste billions and still come out on top like the US has done for decades.
Microsoft experimented with oceanic data centers too, and I don't believe they actually abandoned that project either. It's just Musk and his ilk are very loud and outsized loudness has a tendency to dominate public discourse.
It was concluded in 2024. MS called it a success but also discontinued research and expansion for reasons that don't seem clear from what I can find.
Oh, shame to read that. It sounded like it had real potential.
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