The biggest is solar flares and coronal ejections. Not your normal day to day solar winds and stuff, but honking great gouts of energy and/or coronal mass that are flung out.
Another is comms. How many people would use each server? Really? What’s the bandwidth divided by users? From the ground going up you either need a well aimed dish or a honking lot of power (or a shitload of antenna topside)
Third is Putting lots of these up isn’t a wonderful idea as they will obsolete quickly and need to be replaced. You then have the choice to de-orbit them (wasteful) or leave them up there (danger to navigation).
Fourth, fifth and sixth are security, security and security. How do you apply a security patch to something Up There. Yes, it can be done, but what happens if you Brick It. Back to more engineering and more redundancy and etc. Up goes the cost, up goes the size, down goes the payback. How do you prevent eavesdropping on your communications with it? And with it’s communication with you? Encryption? that’s either more CPU cost, or more payload to use special processors. How do you protect it from deliberate interference from various organisations that wish to compromise it. etc. etc.
While the lure of “free” energy (or more accurately low cost, reliable energy) is compelling, there’s a LOT of ways to get many of those benefits terrestrially. The notion of something like this “reducing poverty” is silly. While there is a lot that processing power can do to reduce poverty, access to raw computing resources ISN’T one of them. You’d be better off deploying something like wifi to GSM connections and building effective mesh network protocols. A for various kinds of research there’s plenty of unused power here on this planet. See this: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/energy/energy_archive/energy_flow_2010/LLNLUSEnergy2010.png If you really want to solve a useful problem in this area turning that “rejected energy” into CPU cycles. You’ve got about 26 Quads of waisted energy JUST from electrical distribution.
That’s a metric buttload of entropy that could be put to work solving problems if we could figure out how to get to it. CPU cycles that are close, easily upgradeable, easily defendable, easily recoverable when they die or get obsolesced.
(I have this pet notion that landfills are GOOD places to put stuff we can’t use right now, because some day some smart bloke is going to figure out how to use nanotech of some kind to (diamond age style) sort the component bits right out and we’ll KNOW where all the high density sources are because we’ll have been dumping our old crud in there for a hundred years. Now if we can just keep the crap out of our ground water....)
Overall it can be done, and if you want to deliver compute resources to station owners or Aboriginal Communities in the outback, or nomadic tribes in the desert regions of the world it might be cost effective. But those folks would need a local computer and network to access it, so why not just give them a slightly beefier lapdog and use some sort of distributed compute engine?
I have a tendancy to agree with Mr. Gerard and Mr. Cunningham on this though—while it’s an interesting technical exercise and I (clearly) don’t mind talking about it, it’s not the sort of thing I come here for.
If someone with direct expertise on the effects of coronal mass ejections and/or solar flares could comment, that would be good. It sounds like it could cause blackouts every so often, if not damage. Note use of Gallium Arsenide electronics to minimize radiation damage.
Comms question is discussed here and here. Needs more input from radio specialists.
Obsolescence discussed here, here, and here. Obsolete thinsats should be useful as ballast for future deployments and as radiation shields, as long as control can be maintained.
Bricking a single sat wouldn’t be too costly. Bricking the whole fleet would be. So patches should be applied in a relatively piecemeal fashion. External attacks are a problem that needs more discussion, I think. Encryption (probably in hardware) does add to the cost, but is probably worth it.
On reducing poverty: My mental model is that anything that boosts the economy and makes business transactions happen more easily in a generalized fashion (i.e. one that is not dramatically favorable to particular monopolizing agents) is going to reduce poverty. It is a matter of increased employment and decreased costs.
While computer distribution and mesh net access have (I think) high potential for helping people in extreme poverty to do more business and education, there’s something to be said for a super-powerful, routinely upgraded computer based in the sky where it can’t easily be stolen or broken by local thugs. Also, the relevant utility calculation isn’t only a matter of reducing extreme poverty. Unlike mesh networks and so forth this would directly benefit middle class people as well, e.g. millions could cancel their internet subscriptions, start hosting computing-intense personal projects for near-free, and stop upgrading their computers so frequently.
On topicality: I think the disconnect many are feeling between this topic and LessWrong is essentially a feature of the map, not the territory. Rationality is all about solving problems, including the problem of what problems to decide to work on. It is important to realize that when a problem seems too far-mode to consider and scrutinize rationally, that is essentially a feature of your skills and instincts, not the problem itself. (Perhaps I ought to write a top level post about that.)
The biggest is solar flares and coronal ejections. Not your normal day to day solar winds and stuff, but honking great gouts of energy and/or coronal mass that are flung out.
Another is comms. How many people would use each server? Really? What’s the bandwidth divided by users? From the ground going up you either need a well aimed dish or a honking lot of power (or a shitload of antenna topside)
Third is Putting lots of these up isn’t a wonderful idea as they will obsolete quickly and need to be replaced. You then have the choice to de-orbit them (wasteful) or leave them up there (danger to navigation).
Fourth, fifth and sixth are security, security and security. How do you apply a security patch to something Up There. Yes, it can be done, but what happens if you Brick It. Back to more engineering and more redundancy and etc. Up goes the cost, up goes the size, down goes the payback. How do you prevent eavesdropping on your communications with it? And with it’s communication with you? Encryption? that’s either more CPU cost, or more payload to use special processors. How do you protect it from deliberate interference from various organisations that wish to compromise it. etc. etc.
While the lure of “free” energy (or more accurately low cost, reliable energy) is compelling, there’s a LOT of ways to get many of those benefits terrestrially. The notion of something like this “reducing poverty” is silly. While there is a lot that processing power can do to reduce poverty, access to raw computing resources ISN’T one of them. You’d be better off deploying something like wifi to GSM connections and building effective mesh network protocols. A for various kinds of research there’s plenty of unused power here on this planet. See this: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/energy/energy_archive/energy_flow_2010/LLNLUSEnergy2010.png If you really want to solve a useful problem in this area turning that “rejected energy” into CPU cycles. You’ve got about 26 Quads of waisted energy JUST from electrical distribution.
That’s a metric buttload of entropy that could be put to work solving problems if we could figure out how to get to it. CPU cycles that are close, easily upgradeable, easily defendable, easily recoverable when they die or get obsolesced.
(I have this pet notion that landfills are GOOD places to put stuff we can’t use right now, because some day some smart bloke is going to figure out how to use nanotech of some kind to (diamond age style) sort the component bits right out and we’ll KNOW where all the high density sources are because we’ll have been dumping our old crud in there for a hundred years. Now if we can just keep the crap out of our ground water....)
Overall it can be done, and if you want to deliver compute resources to station owners or Aboriginal Communities in the outback, or nomadic tribes in the desert regions of the world it might be cost effective. But those folks would need a local computer and network to access it, so why not just give them a slightly beefier lapdog and use some sort of distributed compute engine?
I have a tendancy to agree with Mr. Gerard and Mr. Cunningham on this though—while it’s an interesting technical exercise and I (clearly) don’t mind talking about it, it’s not the sort of thing I come here for.
Oh, I thought it was fine for discussion as popular science with slight local relevance.
If someone with direct expertise on the effects of coronal mass ejections and/or solar flares could comment, that would be good. It sounds like it could cause blackouts every so often, if not damage. Note use of Gallium Arsenide electronics to minimize radiation damage.
Comms question is discussed here and here. Needs more input from radio specialists.
Obsolescence discussed here, here, and here. Obsolete thinsats should be useful as ballast for future deployments and as radiation shields, as long as control can be maintained.
Bricking a single sat wouldn’t be too costly. Bricking the whole fleet would be. So patches should be applied in a relatively piecemeal fashion. External attacks are a problem that needs more discussion, I think. Encryption (probably in hardware) does add to the cost, but is probably worth it.
On reducing poverty: My mental model is that anything that boosts the economy and makes business transactions happen more easily in a generalized fashion (i.e. one that is not dramatically favorable to particular monopolizing agents) is going to reduce poverty. It is a matter of increased employment and decreased costs.
While computer distribution and mesh net access have (I think) high potential for helping people in extreme poverty to do more business and education, there’s something to be said for a super-powerful, routinely upgraded computer based in the sky where it can’t easily be stolen or broken by local thugs. Also, the relevant utility calculation isn’t only a matter of reducing extreme poverty. Unlike mesh networks and so forth this would directly benefit middle class people as well, e.g. millions could cancel their internet subscriptions, start hosting computing-intense personal projects for near-free, and stop upgrading their computers so frequently.
On topicality: I think the disconnect many are feeling between this topic and LessWrong is essentially a feature of the map, not the territory. Rationality is all about solving problems, including the problem of what problems to decide to work on. It is important to realize that when a problem seems too far-mode to consider and scrutinize rationally, that is essentially a feature of your skills and instincts, not the problem itself. (Perhaps I ought to write a top level post about that.)