[ExI] Power satellites are being developed now

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sat, Dec 20, 2025 at 4:14 PM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 20, 2025 at 8:56 AM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>> > As a non-AI with some expertise in the field, I'd recommend no lower
>> than 400-500 km (and even then, perhaps an ion drive - though I
>> recommend some form of on-satellite propulsion in most cases anyway).
>> At 300 km or less, atmospheric drag makes orbital endurance of
>> spacecraft without stationkeeping propulsion a few months at best.
>> https://www.lizard-tail.com/isana/lab/orbital_decay/ provides a good
>> overview.
>
> 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.

I said "no lower than".  If you want to put it a bit higher, that's
defensible, but 10,000 km for this purpose is excessive.  Even if we
assume 1,960,000 m^2 (1,400 m, squared) - as in, a full square flying
face-on into the atmosphere all the time (perhaps as part of
optimizing to face the sun) - 2,000,000 kg at 750 km altitude's got an
orbital endurance of over 20 years (verify with the calculator if you
wish), longer than most solar panels.

>>> >> 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.
>>
>> > It's not primarily the AI-to-user lag, as the AI-to-everything-else
>> lag.  AIs often have to look up stuff for complex queries, and connect
>> to 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.

The Internet is far more than just Wikipedia.
https://www.google.com/search?q=amount+of+data+on+the+internet puts it
in the low three-figure ZB range.  That's hundreds of billions of TB.