[ExI] Power satellites are being developed now

[John Clark]

On Sat, Dec 20, 2025 at 8:56 AM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:


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> *> As a non-AI with some expertise in the field, I'd recommend no
> lowerthan 400-500 km (and even then, perhaps an ion drive - though
> Irecommend some form of on-satellite propulsion in most cases anyway).At
> 300 km or less, atmospheric drag makes orbital endurance ofspacecraft
> without stationkeeping propulsion a few months at
> best.https://www.lizard-tail.com/isana/lab/orbital_decay/
> <https://www.lizard-tail.com/isana/lab/orbital_decay/> provides a
> goodoverview.*



*The larger a satellite is the sooner its orbit will decay, and a power
satellite would be very very large. Claude mentions that "A 1.4 GW
satellite design weighs 2,000 tonnes and measures 1.4 km in diameter"; that
would be considered a very small power satellite, but your calculator tells
me that if it was in a 500 km orbit it would decay in re-entry the
atmosphere and crash to the Earth in just 94 days. A 500 km orbit would be
fine for most satellites, but not for something as huge as a power
satellite. *

> * >> As for latency, I don't think that would be a major problem because
>> it doesn't matter much if it takes 3 seconds for an AI to answer your
>> question instead of 2 seconds, although you wouldn't want to use it to
>> operate a car or a robot that's on the Earth.*
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> *> It's not primarily the AI-to-user lag, as the
> AI-to-everything-elselag.  AIs often have to look up stuff for complex
> queries, and connectto offboard resources.  I've seen this get to 10s even
> in some simple queries.*


*When training a new AI that wouldn't be a big problem, what you need is
raw computing power.  And besides, Google tells me that*
* "As of late 2025, the English Wikipedia contains over 7.1 million
articles (5+ billion words) and 64.6 million total pages. The compressed
text of these articles is roughly 24–156 GB. while the entire project,
Total media files (images, audio, video) across all projects are
approximately 200 TB."*

*My new iPhone can store 2TB, so I don't think a data satellite would have
to contact earth very often if it wanted to look something up. *

* John K Clark*



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