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…