If you’re receiving data optically from a space based laser, yes you are quite vulnerable to your detector being jammed by a much closer laser that doesn’t have to be nearly as powerful to add noise to the signal.
Why do you think GPS is so easy to spoof?
Actually I just googled (clauded?) to learn more about space lasers and found a paper describing interrupting quantum key distribution (tamper evident but not jam proof!) with a 1kw laser on the ground pointed at the satellite! So it really does not take many photons to fuck up an encrypted signal.
“ Vulnerability of Satellite Quantum Key Distribution to Disruption from Ground-Based Lasers”
You don’t have to intercept the satellites in orbit, they fall back to earth in a few years on their own. What SpaceX et al need to defend against is attacks while they are still on the ground or seconds after launch. Next round of investment will put the factories on the moon (only then will we see calls from the general public to Blow Up the Moon)
This idea that space is a way to get out of the reach of NIMBYs is so dumb.
a: now you’re in everyone’s back yard, since satellites in orbit can be seen by the naked eye at twilight zipping across the sky, so now the whole earth hates you
b: you are still launching from earth, which is a pretty significant target if you’re worried about ecoterrorism.
When I looked it up earlier, it seemed to me that to scale this up we would require larger rockets than Spaceship if we cannot launch hundreds of times per day.
Cost is one thing, the other is whether it will be permitted at all.
Then there's the power grid problem.
I understand expanding the grid takes a long time, thus the gas turbines. Which I understand are also supply-constrained, and environmentalists are not happy either.
I'm no scientist or financial analyst, but I could imagine that the space thing would be viable especially in a scenario where AI capabilities continue to grow.
If AI really does replace not only most knowledge work but also other labor via robotics, and this requires enormous compute, we are going to want to scale this up at a much faster rate.
Preferably without covering a tenth of the planet with gas generators.
Are we, though? Going to want to scale this up, I mean.
Unless economic systems around the world change significantly very soon, this AI replacement you so cavalierly mention would cause significant portion of human population to reach poverty, causing much unrest and mass deaths.
I don't buy into demonizing the rich, including Altman, Amodei, Musk and co.
I am not concerned that this will be the outcome of the productivity surge.
We will have enough for everyone, and ensuring comfortable living standards for the general population is going to be in the interest of those in power, even if you assume very selfish motivations.
I'd also like to point out that both Anthropic and OpenAI created frameworks to monitor labor market impact and propose responses.
> b: you are still launching from earth, which is a pretty significant target if you’re worried about ecoterrorism.
This so much. Good luck destroying a DC on earth without a very strong force. On the other hand, destroying a rocket on its launchpad just take one FPV drone.
> Good luck destroying a DC on earth without a very strong force.
Leaving aside the DCs already destroyed in the Iran totally not a War by an enemy that can be easily crushed at any moment ...
DCs in mainland US aren't well defended - a pattern of shrapnel heads landed by a mobile mortar or two with a 2 km radius would render most in need of some upkeep.
Sure, but in my view any organized actor with military hardware in their hands count as a “very strong force” when compared to the average Joe with a Molotov cocktail. And Iran, as a state actor with ballistic capabilities is obviously one as well.
There are significant differences in feasibility and cost between putting something in low Earth orbit (or even very low orbit like Starlink) and putting it in any other orbit around anything else - like easily 2-5x depending on where you're going to put it. I'll leave it to the Kerbal Space Program veterans to explain the mechanics that also make it much more difficult to actually launch and deploy successfully unless you're happy with just having the DC arbitrarily orbit around the sun (and drift year-by-year).
Once you move outside low Earth orbit (i.e. outside the magnetosphere) you also have to deal with much more radiation so using regular commercially available hardware for the DC is no longer an option so you're looking at another 10-100x increase in cost for the chips alone (and at worse performance because radiation-hardened chips are literally generations behind at this point). You'll also need signficantly more (very heavy) shielding and that also adds to your launch costs. Of course OceanGate is a good reminder that billionaires don't always concern themselves with such trivialities as using equipment and materials actually suited for the task if it means they get an opportunity to brag about how they're disrupting the market by jerry-rigging mission critical components.
Speaking in terms of feasibility again, availability isn't the only problem you'd be facing. Obviously latency is going to be horrendous because of the incredible distances involved but really there's just literally no infrastructure you can piggyback off of. You could potentially achieve data rates of up to tens of Gbit/s even from L4/L5 (stable orbits 1 AU away) using something like NASA's DCOS but this requires optical ground stations or LEO relays, bringing the weakest link much more within reach again.
Even if you somehow manage to develop sufficiently ruggedized variants of reasonably modern chips, add the necessary shielding and develop and build out the necessary communication infrastructure from scratch (remember that we haven't even considered how we generate enough power to run the actual DC itself) and are also willing to accept the disgusting latency and packet loss ratio, the elephant in the room remains that DCs on the ground require constant maintenance to operate and replace failing parts. DCs in space can only ever be disposable - once any redundancies run out, they're just very expensive space junk.
But you have a point: putting it in space is inherently ridiculously expensive. Getting it to L4/L5 is only insignificantly more expensive than getting it to L1/L2 but assuming you can fit the entire DC in a single Falcon Heavy (so you don't also have to worry about assembling the entire thing in space across multiple launches) you're limited to a payload of 25 t and the launch itself already costs you $120 million. Of those 25 t only 7 t or so can be spent on actual compute so your space DC would probably be constrained to the equivalent of about 500 GPUs (assuming this is for AI because everything is for AI these days). Most of the weight budget and the actual cost however would be eaten by all the structural and infrastructural parts required - in terms of cost for compute a space DC that fits in a single Falcon Heavy is easily an order of magnitude more expensive than one built in the US today and those don't need to be replaced from scratch when a significant chunk of the initial parts have degraded.
TL;DR: Building a DC in space is easily 10x as expensive, requires technology that hasn't been developed yet, requires you to also build all infrastructure needed to actually operate and connect to it, and in the end just gives you a high latency low performance Beowulf cluster that is rapidly converting itself into an expensive piece of space junk if random debris doesn't kill it first.
Very different aspect ratio. I can’t stand the regular iphones it’s impossible to use one handed without using that dumb flick gesture to bring the top of the screen down to the bottom half
Why do you think GPS is so easy to spoof?
Actually I just googled (clauded?) to learn more about space lasers and found a paper describing interrupting quantum key distribution (tamper evident but not jam proof!) with a 1kw laser on the ground pointed at the satellite! So it really does not take many photons to fuck up an encrypted signal.
“ Vulnerability of Satellite Quantum Key Distribution to Disruption from Ground-Based Lasers”
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8659886/
reply