J
@woozle Even then, it's not actually economical if the customers aren't willing to pay extra for the resources, which will be highly latent in a world that despises latency.
You end up with Sealand all over again, where the idea is better than the implementation ever can be.
Eventually, you have orbiting scrap, cluttering the sky, slowly decaying in orbit.
It'd have to be as cheap as shipping a fully laden 40ft intermodal (ISO 668) container from Oakland to Shanghai before its actually economical. That's about $3000 USD for the container, not counting cargo, insurance, etc.. Max capacity is about 30500 kg.
That's getting a datacenter in orbit, securely, with cooling, radiators, shielding, power, and redundancy for under $3/kg.
That's not going to happen.
So, if you put a bunch of computers in orbit, ignoring the hard problems like heat, cooling, moving heat away from sensitive components, per KG fuel costs to get it in orbit, fitting the shit in to geostationary, or other high orbit.
You still have "how do you deal with equipment failures and loss of components" and "get enough up there to ensure redundancy".
I don't know if you've built a datacenter, but that's a bunch of mass to move.
@cstross
Space is a little more hostile than the deepest parts of the ocean. Except in one way: there's no atmosphere to block the nastiest bits of radiation out there.
Computers really do not like radiation. They like it less than DNA does, and are more sensitive to it. And the smaller the fab size of the chip is, the more sensitive it'll be to ionizing radiation.
“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” in the post-Internet era.
Every fucking time, we’ve had free speech rights impinged, it was “protect the chiiildren” or “what about the children” always about porn.
But when actual harm is being done, non consensually, actual CSAM being made and passed around, fucking crickets.
These spineless fucks.