Spending all the money you have and all the money you can get and all the money you can promise has a number of side effects, such as gigantic data centres full of high-power chips just to run lyin…
  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
    6·
    1 day ago

    Cooling in space is an absolute arse. Space is an excellent insulator for heat. That’s why a thermos works. In space, thermal management is job number one. All you can use is radiators. Getting rid of your 200 kilowatts will need about 500 square metres.

    To drive home how easy this is to work out, the Codex for the Mass Effect series1 explicitly points out that radiation is the only way to cool off in space, and goes into detail on how in-universe spaceships (civilian and military) deal with heat buildup.

    BioWare did their homework on this shit for a series of sci-fi RPGs which started in the early days of the Xbox 360 and the PS3. That the startup bros, tech co’s and billionaire CEOs pushing this have failed or refused to recognise this shit is goddamn negligence.

    So space is a bit hard. A lot of the sci-fi guys suggest oceans! We’ll put the data centres underwater and cooling will be great!

    The only way I see that idea working is if humanity works out underwater cities (e.g. Rapture from the original Bioshock) first. That’d make the issue of maintenance easier to deal with, even if getting new parts from the surface would remain a PITA.

    1 Specifically “Starships: Heat Management”, under Ships and Vehicles, in the Secondary Codex"

    • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      24 hours ago

      The tabletop game Attack Vector: Tactical from 2004 also models the need for radiators and risk of overheating.

      Science fiction from the 20th century tended to ignore cooling and cosmic rays (the one exception I can recall is Jerry Pournelle’s superscience Langston Field) and we know these guys are not up to date even on pop culture or good at reading.