The Moon also has 14 day long nights, while space has permanent sunlight for your solar panels.

I suspect this is really the fundamental idea behind this whole plan.

Earth keeps getting more livable!

We have a record high population, healthier and richer than ever.

It's also infinitly easier to get 24/7 unadulterated sunlight for your solar panels.

Not 24/7 in low earth orbit, but perhaps at an earth-moon or earth-sun L4/L5 lagrange point. Though with higher latency to earth.

There are Sun-Synchronous Orbits, and those are what SpaceX plans to use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit

Well, that's neat. TIL. Thanks for the link!

So what? Why is it important to have 24/7 solar, that you cannot have on the ground? On the ground level you have fossil fuels.

I wonder if you were thinking about muh emissions for a chemical rocket launched piece of machinery containing many toxic metals to be burnt up in the air in 3-5 years... It doesn't sound more environmentally friendly.

Getting enough energy for your AI data centers is one of the most limiting factors for AI technology.

Solar in space is about 5-10x as effective as solar on the ground.

So what? Just build some nuclear power plants if AI data centers are so important. It can even work at night when it is infinitely as effective as solar on the ground!

Also I'm astounded how important AI data centers are when we are running out of freshwater, to mention a thing we could easily solve with focusing our efforts on it instead of this. But yeah, surely the Space AI Data Centers (aka. "SkyNet") is the most important we must build...

Also this is just about Elon jumping the shark...

CEQA is pretty universally considered a disaster.

The alternative is not to have no environmental regulation. California could copy the regulations of any of the 49 other states and be much better off.

>California could copy the regulations of any of the 49 other states and be much better off.

Says whom?

California has a huge population. California has a massive water shortage problem. California has wide areas vulnerable to wildfires. California has piles of small ecosystems that are fragile and can be easily wiped out.

Saying California could copy some states like Iowas regulations makes negative sense.

The major problems with CEQA are:

- the extreme cost and time spent on mandatory Environmental Impact Reports

- it allows pretty much anyone to sue projects over just about anything, which can also add many years before projects can start

None of this has anything to do with California specific environmental concerns

Note that this is only about European governments choosing to not use US software.

Yeah, and once the precedent is settled, you can bet that the private sector will follow, and give birth to a bunch of local service companies to deploy and support those solutions in an healthier and fairer manner than the current GSuite/MSOffice duopoly.

OS will be cheaper. No monopoly rendite + development across more shoulders.

You can be very sure that millions of Europeans and large numbers of businesses are finding alternatives.

I was going to say 'No way, profit > idealistic moral virtues'. But I could totally see Europe knee capping themselves. Look at how their food is inferior to the US because they stick to tradition.

I can totally see themselves doing this out of pride/humiliation.

Not direct numbers. But you can see r/BuyFromEU has 795K Weekly visitors. That is A LOT. In comparison, r/OpenAI has 676K Weekly visitors and r/webdev has 691K Weekly visitors.

I'm surprised they weren't reusing words already.

Obviously a finite resource will run out after a while.

This may well be why the game became such a hit among everyone.

I find Quordle a much better game than Wordle, since there is some real strategy involved, but still not overly much.

The big advantage is 24/7 unblocked solar energy.

It’s not 24/7 — depending on the orbit they’ll spend significant time in the earth’s shadow

I forget the term in the press release, but the plan really is to place them in orbits that are always out of the earth’s shadow.

I assume that means they're pretty far out, which is OK for AI training.

Source: Just Trust Me Bro

Pretty sure the plan is to use Starlinks for Earth communication.