Michael Mealling -- e/acc

Innovation At Speed: A Grand Strategy The goal isn't to "beat China"... The goal is for America to remember that it is an ambitious and fearless country eager to leap into the future. When we do that, "beating China" becomes a mildly interesting side effect. open.substack.com/pub/rocketforg…

@jackrwilkie "stations"? That is a selection bias...

I’m not trying to hurt any Gen X feelings with this, but we as a society have GOT to chill with the Journey music. They were on 3 stations at the same time today. It’s been 40 years. Move on already.

@CernBasher @pbeisel The race between space solar power and fusion is going to be fascinating. One area where space-based power generation fails is in industrial heat production.

Here's what I'm now realizing... Putting energy generation in space (via orbital solar arrays) doesn’t just solve the power bottleneck for 100 TW of orbital data centers. It likely triggers a cascade that will relocate entire categories of energy-hungry activity off-Earth. I wonder what other energy intensive industries will greatly benefit from moving to space? @aaronburnett - has your team thought about this?

SpaceX Musk compensation incentive goal: 100 TW "operates data centers in space that provide at least 100 terawatts of compute capacity." Remember the famous Terafab chart showing 1 TW labeled "Expected compute demand from Tesla + SpaceX"? The Musk milestone is 100 TW. Have they gone insane? Actually no. We could hit 100 TW of demand in less than 10 years. Today global AI data center power capacity is about 30 GW. Let's check this against growth in the CPU growth era, 1980-2000's. The growth rate then was 58% per year (growing at 1.58x per year). By that measure, 30 GW will grow to 1 TW in 7.7 years (2034). And 100 TW at 17.7 years (2043). BUT, AI compute demand is growing much faster than the CPU-era growth. About ~3.4× per year. That’s more than twice as fast as the historical 58% rate. So the demand for 1 TW equates to only 3 years and 100 TW only 7 years. Even in the most optimistic case (e.g., 1.5× FLOPS/W efficiency gains every year from Blackwell/Rubin-class chips), we still hit 1 TW in ~4.3 years and 100 TW in ~10 years. And I think inference compute demand is going to accelerate from here!

@sterlingcrispin @deanwball Commonwealth is already working to connect its Richmond, VA plant to the grid. The NRC is on a short path to regulating fusion plants similar to nuclear medicine facilities (e.g., you can put one in our basement). I'm betting on far less than 25 years.

@deanwball the problem with fusion is that its expensive and complex to set up, we can whip up huge solar installations much faster and much cheaper maybe in 25 years that'll change for fusion but so far it doesn't seem like it

I have truly never understood how solar-maxis intend to deal with this reality; I expect there to be data centers 100 times this nameplate power draw in the nearish future. What you see below is 100mw. The response I usually get is "America has a lot of land," which is just bleak. Indeed, it turns *me* into a doomer, invoking as it does the notion of machines papering over our soil (which powers us) to power themselves. And it's not just data centers. In a world with electric freight trucks, a *truck stop* might require as much solar as you see pictured here, if not much more. A truck stop! Solar is fine; I do not have a principled opposition to it (which I do to eg wind). But solar's lack of energy density makes the solar-maximalist future a "loser premise," to borrow a phrase--at least it is a "loser premise" for human dignity. The good version of the future is of course a mix of many energy sources, but with a heavy bent toward fusion/fission and geothermal.

That idea is incredibly culturally specific. In India you would be incredibly correct. There was extreme violence when the Indian government tried to change farming practices to be more productive. The US has that to some degree when it comes to subsistence farming, but not industrial-scale farming.

am I? I believe I said I am opposed to uneconomic ethanol growing too (and have been for a long time). What I said is that comparing agriculture (which is deeply rooted in the human psyche) to "stuff we need to power data centers" makes people really angry, which is true. You need better bedside manner.

He is asking you a different question...

@ANF_1980s Its impossible to have this discussion since your understanding and knowledge of even most basic things is on a level of a toddler 😂🤷

American delusion ja misunderstanding toward Europe is incredible. And Im not only talking about MAGA unfortunately. I have friends in USA and every time I talk with them, an incomprehensible ignorance appears.

@FireBlogger I see you have never felt the need to do something important that, while it may hurt, sends human optionality deep into the future.

Inhabiting Mars means that when you lift off towards the distant sphere, you likely aren't coming back. But even if they reduce the round-trip time to 9 months, is it worth that much lost time sitting in a capsule? And what do you do once you are on Mars? No matter how big the living domes are, your options for long strolls are severely limited. The logistics of replenishing food supplies are rarely discussed. No one wants to eat rehydrated meals forever. Elon Musk is a hero, supersmart, unselfish, and forward-thinking. Our home is powered by Tesla solar and batteries. It seems the #Mars subject is a reach. sherwood.news/tech/spacex-co…

@LensScientific It was...

Do you think time travel will ever be possible?

@OrevaZSN There are plenty of primitive places in the world you can go. They have "clean" water (you will need to purify it to remove the parasites). No robots. No datacenters. Plenty of bees. You can choose to live there right now. No one is stopping you.

I don’t want a city on Mars. I don’t want AI in every app. I don’t want data centres in space. I don’t want humanoids or flying cars. I want clean water. I want a stable climate. I want bees to survive. And a habitable planet.

@MichaelEMcNeil @RuneKek The Antarctic Treaty System enters the chat...

@RuneKek Antarctica doesn't have “rights” either.

the moon should have rights. dont build shit on the moon, like antarctica. spend a few more years preparing and then take it to mars where we wont be able to see it

@RuneKek Nope. I want to see the light of civilization on the Moon.

@JohnBryanModica @peterrhague Cost-benefit is in the mind of the individual. Some individuals are members of corporations or governments. Other individuals are wealthy enough to make that decision on their own. We are legion... (We are Bob)

@peterrhague Quite true, but the cost / benefit analysis, is currently more in line with the Earth / Luna system, than a Mars mission at this time. Besides, the technology to reach and survive a Mars sojourn will be better innovated via Moon missions at this time.

Lots of people unfamiliar with spaceflight have the idea that the gap between getting to the Moon and getting to Mars is much larger than it is, because they think in terms of distance not velocity. Artemis II provides a helpful way of developing the correct intuition - that rocket and capsule, as flown, could have reached a Mars transfer orbit. The rocket imparted about 12km/s to get the capsule into a high energy orbit. From then, the service module only had to add 0.4km/s at perigee to get to lunar flyby. To get to a Mars transfer orbit from the same position, flying in the window this November, would take only 0.9km/s - well within the capability of the spacecraft, which had lots of propellant to spare on this mission. I covered some of the maths of this kind of manoeuvre here: planetocracy.org/p/artemis-ii-d… Obviously this would be a bad idea and the crew couldn’t survive more than a couple of weeks. But the limit is not propulsion, it’s life support. If Orion met a Starship in Earth orbit, with living space and supplies for a long voyage, the stack could easily perform a Mars flyby mission using a fairly small burn from the Starships engines.

@KristofferJos @Pinboard Me.

@Pinboard Ok, if he manage to that he deserves the money. But who would like to live there long term?

Whether there's ever a settlement on Mars depends entirely on whether healthy human embryos can develop in 0.38g, an open scientific question immune to stock incentive plans.

@Pinboard @HeroicLife Wrong... the shielding necessary is a) known and b) easily integrated into the centrifuge's walls.

@HeroicLife You would need this to be buried underground for radiation reasons. But still an eminently practical solution!

💥NEW: Is NASA’s SLS helping us reach the Moon before China or holding us back? The opportunity costs are massive. Must Read: Economic Analysis by former U.S. Treasury Deputy Secretary Michael Faulkender —> spacefrontier.substack.com/p/the-economic…

@DrPhiltill rocketforge.org/2009/06/09/a-p…

If you read one article about the Pluto planet definition controversy, this is it. Very well written, and very informative. spacedaily.com/g-pluto-has-gl…

@TimDuy The Antarctic Treaty Systems enters the chat...

We can’t put a million people in Antartica. We won’t put a million more people on the vastly more inhospitable Mars.

We are thrilled to announce that AlumaPower is now a 2x graduate from the @CreativeDLab, with our latest graduation from the Texas Energy Stream! We are grateful for all the support and connections we've received throughout our time. Thank you to the CDL team for having us.

@JesterJum Its called a "loss leader". en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_lead…

Why does a hot, delicious, and ready-to-eat rotisserie chicken cost less than a cold, raw ass chicken i gotta take home and cook myself? Can someone PLEASE answer that for me cause I just dont get it.

@rexthundercock @Orillacosmica @peterrhague Hmm... Clinton/Gore won the 1992 election. NASA did do that but NASA was created to provide a non-military fig leaf for rocket production during the Cold War. The fact that happy accidents occurred was a lucky side effect. But it wasn't intentional at its creation.

@mmealling @Orillacosmica @peterrhague The al gore campaign lost, you can let it rest now... Most of NASAs work is deliberate not happy accidents however. They very intentionally pushed the boundaries and so many facets of our lives now are due to intentional creations from space studies and flight applications.

This has always been intuitively obvious to me, but not everyone seems to get it?

I agree, but that is a lucky side effect, not a core intent. A lot of our modern world is the result of happy accidents. Take this network for example, if Al Gore hadn't been talking about information superhighways in the 1991 campaign AND the National Science Foundation hadn't removed the prohibition on commercial use of the NSFNet backbone in April of '92, I doubt we would be using this network. We would probably be using a system built by the cable companies, Larry Ellison, and Bill Gates.

@mmealling @Orillacosmica @peterrhague Maybe that's the problem. We still rely on NASA missions and telescopes and history and studies and satellites. They don't have to be the #1 launch provider to have left an indelible mark everyone builds off of.