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How does earth cool? Through radiation. If the data centers stay on earth, earth will heat up. At some point there will be so many data centers that earth cannot take more heat.
I mean, yes, but that amount of heat is fairly negligible, especially relative to global warming from fossil fuel emissions.
There is no limit and with robots there can be exponential growth in construction velocity. Almost all available energy, including space solar farms and both nuclear energies, could be used for AI. If the data centers are on earth that will heat earth faster than radiation can cool it.
Mate go educate yourself first before you make an embarrassment out of you
You’re talking about things that have wildly different orders of magnitude as if they were similar.
You’re also ignoring that sending all that material into space is not efficient at all in terms of heat and emissions
Currently we have 240W in and out per square meter and have a 1W surplus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_energy_budget#Earth's_energy_imbalance_(EEI)
If all oil, coal and gas is burned, the greenhouse effect gets stronger. Earth heats up, more water evaporates, even less radiation reaches space.
Earth has 510 trillion square meters.
One current datacenter needs 100 MW. So 5 million datacenters would add another 1W per square meter. That's round about the output the nuclear fusion people are calculating. 500,000 1G fusion reactors would be needed instead of 10,000. https://www.iter.org/node/20687/will-fusion-run-out-fuel
That's not orders of magnitude off.
To put the data centers into space, not everything has to be lifted. If resources from the asteroid belts are used, only the starting materials and tools have to be launched.
Even if it is expensive, if earth cannot radiate more, any additional data center has to be in space.
How far up your ass did you pull up the 5 million datacenters from?
You’re just throwing random terms and numbers around at random thinking that makes you smart.
in trying to defend that we need data centers in space (regardless of its its feasible or not) because of the heat that they would generate on earth, you first ignore the energy (and monetary) cost of sending all of that into orbit and then justify that by saying that it’s feasible if we just do asteroid mining and space construction and assembly. Did I suddenly wake up in 2126 from my nap or what?
If we are that much worried now about earth heating up then maybe it would be more fruitful to think if we need this many data centers and why as well as other types of activities and social classes, before we go wild on wrecking the planet by launching massive constructions in space because we’ve wrecked the planet all so that certain people can add another 1 or 2 zeros to their bank account.
The 5 million doubles our energy surplus that causes global warming. That's where the number comes from, to understand the proportions.
We will have an arms race between China and the US. For national security, all caution will be thrown into the wind. "it would be more fruitful to think" - people won't.
Both sides will build as fast as possible, with the help of robots.
No, but with AI, progress will arrive faster.
There are a little more than 200k hospitals in the entire world.
What you are proposing is a data center for roughly 1.5k people. Not US and China, this includes the entire world. Now you get why your numbers are ridiculous?
You can’t just work your way backwards from a number that is convenient to you. This is why I said you are comparing things with vastly different orders of magnitude.
As I said before, please go educate yourself further because you continue this embarrassment
Have a nice evening.
The data centers are not for AI application but for development. I don't think there is an upper limit on AI improvement. So whatever can be built will be built.
Thanks, you too!
The sun is continuously delivering 173 petawatts (PW) of energy to the earth, the biggest planned datacenter will have a capacity of about 1 GW, or 0.000001 PW.
The heat created through datacenters, and all other human activity combined, is minuscule compared to the incoming heat delivered by the sun. The reason climate change is an issue isn't that humans are doing things that generate heat, it's that by dumping CO2 into the atmosphere we're preventing the earth from being able to effectively radiate that heat back into space.
The amount of heat the earth normally radiates is roughly equal to the amount of heat the sun delivers. But, CO2 and other greenhouse gases are preventing the heat from radiating into space. Instead it gets trapped in the atmosphere, so the planet warms up.
AI will take what it gets. Have 100 million of the 1G datacenters and earth is heated by two suns. If earth should not boil, far less data centers are possible on earth, which only leaves space for more computation power.
Ok, once we get to 90 million 1GW datacenters we should start worrying. Currently we're approaching 1.
If you just keep adding data centers they will get too hot to stay functioning though, also there's such a thing as thermal equilibrium and heat transfer through radiation increases as the thermal gradient increases. But if you hypothetically could keep building more compute then eventually you'll reach a point where you can't keep it cold enough to run and it stops working, I'm not sure what the actual numbers would be like or how much space it would actually take but right now we're still orders of magnitude away from heating the planet up more than a few degrees. It's an insane amount of energy to heat up a planet sized object meaningfully.