[ExI] AI computers and power in space

[Keith Henson]

On Mon, Apr 29, 2024 at 3:17 PM Keith Lofstrom <keithl at keithl.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Apr 29, 2024 at 09:55:12AM -0700, Keith Henson wrote:
> ... (John Clarke?)...
> > The spending that the industry’s giants expect artificial intelligence
>
> ....
> > Data centers are already generating a fair amount of NIMBY pushback.
> > This is a way to push computation off Earth.
> ....
> http://server-sky.com
>
> I've worked on "computation off Earth" for years, about
> a dozen conference presentations and journal papers.

Server Sky may be a better approach, but the reason I am proposing
something much like a conventional data center is that Server Sky
combines too many difficult concepts at once.  Even this proposal is
probably a bridge too far.  However, there are people (Musk) with a
foot in AI and space.

snip

> L1-AI will help in more important ways.  The substrates will
> use vast amounts of aluminum.  There's plenty of aluminum oxide
> in lunar regolith - but no carbon to reduce that oxide to
> metal.  VAST thinsat manufacturing systems will produce
> teratonnes of lunar-sourced aluminum, but will need to import
> gigatonnes of carbon to cycle through the manufacturing process.

If you are using the Hall process, the main input is electrical power.
The carbon electrodes do burn up making CO2.  But that can be reduced
to carbon with hydrogen and the hydrogen regenerated by electrolysis.

snip

KeithH