A Beautiful Convergence

… of Two Seemingly Separate Technologies

There is lots of excitement these days about the emergence of incredibly powerful “chat” AIs, such as Claude.AI and, of course, ChatGPT4. Less attention is given to the prospect of a massive increase in data storage requirements, and of energy to power and cool all of that computing and storage.

Yet that prospect is giving some serious planners and policymakers headaches. Consider that:

… AI could account for as much as one-tenth of the world’s electricity use by 2025. (Source: MIT Technology Review)

… a single LLM interaction may consume as much power as leaving a low-brightness LED lightbulb on for one hour. (Source: IEEE Spectrum)

For decades, we’ve been hearing objections to the development of outer space along the lines of, “there’s nothing you can do in space that you can’t do well enough on Earth” and “why waste money on space when you can use it to solve problems here?”

Though each of these arguments has been persuasive to an extent, the first fails to consider the astounding megaprojects which reusable rockets and, soon, the space elevator will enable. It fails to consider the major ecological benefits of mining asteroids for every manner of raw material rather than doing so down here. It also fails to consider the search for life in our own neighborhood, including nearly a dozen planets and moons within our solar system.

The second argument misses the fact that money is not spent in space but on space. Nobody wants electronic bank entries, paper or coins in space — for any reason whatsoever! However, money spent on space is now one of the fastest-growing segments of the global economy, benefiting millions down here.

The European Space Agency and others have identified a perfect confluence of two booming areas of technology, which should greatly benefit both.

The ever-increasing cooling and electricity requirements for burgeoning AI use lead to an excellent “new use case” for orbital platform development. If data centers are built in orbit, possibly at stable Lagrange points, then cooling them is easily addressed, to the same extent as terrestrial data centers, and disposal of waste heat becomes trivial.

(I say easily addressed in the sense that, while such cooling will always require a cooling medium, it can either be recovered and condensed from the same asteroidal material from which the orbital platform itself will be constructed — or hoisted from Earth, along with the construction components of such a platform.)

Electricity can be provided on a stable and continuing basis through use of Solar Power Satellites (SPS), the development of which was recently catalyzed by a successful Caltech project.

Here is what Claude.AI had to say about this subject:

Yes, there have been some discussions and proposals around placing data centers and computers in orbit rather than on Earth. Here are a few key things that have been written about this concept:

1. **Energy consumption**. In orbit, there is potential for essentially unlimited solar energy from solar panels. This abundant clean energy could power large computing operations without concern for electricity costs or fossil fuel consumption associated with terrestrial data centers.

2. **Waste heat dissipation**. In the vacuum of space, waste heat from servers and other computing hardware could radiate away from the hardware more easily. On Earth, cooling and dissipating waste heat is a major challenge and cost for data center operations.

3. **Weightlessness and vacuum conditions**. The microgravity and vacuum conditions in orbit may enable some computing hardware and data storage technologies that are difficult or less efficient to implement on Earth. For example, floating disk drives, 3D stacked computing elements, etc.

4. **Physical security**. Being in orbit provides more physical security, isolation and protection for the computing infrastructure than terrestrial facilities, which are vulnerable to natural disasters, human threats, etc.

5. **Communication lags**. The speed of light communication lags to/from orbit introduces latency that may limit the types of computing feasible. Real-time computing applications would likely still need to be grounded.

Some papers, articles and companies that have proposed and examined space-based computing include:

- “On the Feasibility of Spacecraft Hosted Data Centers” (Liu [sic] et al., 2021)
- “Opportunities and Challenges of Spaceborne Cloud Computing” (Barker & Tucker, 2018)
- SpaceBelt space-based cloud services vision by Cloud Constellation Corporation

So in summary — yes, orbiting data centers have been seriously proposed to overcome limitations of ground facilities. But tradeoffs exist, and it is still a largely conceptual vision at this point.

[One reference Claude made was unsupported, and has been deleted. It also misspelled an author’s name, noted in context.]

Though I almost entirely agree with Claude’s analysis, which addressed security aspects I had not considered, I disagree regarding the need for computing to remain terrestrial due to latency.

While there will be time delays in transmissions to and from Earth, placing computation in the same orbital platform as the data upon which it relies will greatly reduce any latency problem. This is true by virtue of the fact that, for many advanced problems, massive data storage does not require instantly updated databases. Updating data bases can occur automatically in the background, while human users of answers will require a comparatively tiny data transmission footprint.

This will never be a use case for high-speed trading, which in my view is a good thing. That activity consumes vast resources of computing, storage, and data transmission in exchange for little benefit to society.

On the other hand, as tomorrow’s quantum computers — often, requiring supercooling of components — are married to tomorrow’s AIs, we should see a breathtaking array of seemingly intractable problems become very tractable, and quickly.

I believe it is this to which Sam Altman alluded when he recently spoke of an imminent “Golden Age” for humanity.

While some fear the emergence of AGI (artificial general intelligence), especially the self-aware and self-directed kind, I am convinced that it can be demonstrated that we should be racing to develop such AIs as fast as possible, supplanting today’s narrow and unaware AIs.

Effectively unlimited raw materials and effectively unlimited clean energy are two of the three Pillars of Abundance I discuss in A Celebration Society. The other is effectively unlimited organizing intelligence; increasingly, AI.

Together, these three attainments, all achievable in the next few decades , make possible the creation, recycling and re-creation of every imaginable kind of material object — not even considering how ubiquitous virtual reality with zero latency will slash demand for physical objects.

There’s no question that, pardon the pun, skyrocketing demand for the automation of mental work will cause a major construction boom in data centers, AI processing facilities, and quantum computers. The only question is, will this construction boom exacerbate problems of waste heat, pollution, and sprawl of data centers while taxing our capacities for the production of vital electricity, or will it lead us upwards.

Time will tell.