[elihu]

Honestly, there's not a lot else I can think of if your goal is find some practical and profitable way to take advantage of relatively cheap access to near-Earth space. Communication is a big one, but Starlink is already doing that.

One of the things space has going for it is abundant cheap energy in the form of solar power. What can you do with megawatts of power in space though? What would you do with it? People have thought about beaming it back to Earth, but you'd take a big efficiency hit.

AI training needs lots of power, and it's not latency sensitive. That makes it a good candidate for space-based compute.

I'm willing to believe it's the best low-hanging fruit at the moment. You don't need any major technological advances to build a proof-of-concept. Whether it's possible for this to work well enough that it's actually cheaper than an equivalent terrestrial datacenter now or in the near future is something I can't answer.

[p1esk]

You don't need any major technological advances to build a proof-of-concept

You do - cooling those datacenters in space is an unsolved problem.

[rlt]

Sure it is, just not economically at that scale yet. But if Starship brings the cost to orbit down significantly, maybe.

[mlindner]

We have radiators on the ISS. Even if you kept the terrible performance of those ancient radiator designs (regularly exposed to sunlight, simplistic ammonia coolant, low temperature) you could just make them bigger and radiate the needed energy. Yes it would require a bit of engineering but to call it an "unsolved problem" is just exaggerating.

[adventured]

Bezos has been pushing manufacturing-in-space for a long time, as a ideal candidate for what to do in space that you might prefer to not do on Earth. Robotics, AI automation, manufacturing - combo it in space, let the robots manufacture for us in space. Abundant energy, low concerns about most forms of pollution. We'll need to dramatically improve our ability to transit mass to and from cheaply first of course (we're obviously talking many decades into the future).

[_fizz_buzz_]

> Bezos has been pushing manufacturing-in-space for a long time, as a ideal candidate for what to do in space that you might prefer to not do on Earth. Robotics, AI automation, manufacturing - combo it in space, let the robots manufacture for us in space.

LOL, this seems so far off from the reality of what manufacturing looks like in reality. - sending raw materials up there - service technicians are necessary ALL THE TIME, in fully automated production lines - sending stuff back down

Maybe I lack vision, but data centers in space is a 1000x times better idea and that is already a terrible idea.

[ai-x]

When Bezos first mentioned drone delivery, many intelligent, serious people laughed at it and accused of Bezos running out of ideas as Amazon was stagnant

[ehnto]

That is a fun thought experiment, as we wouldn't want to manufacture too far away from earth we may still be within the earth's atmosphere. I wonder what effect dumping greenhouse gases into the very upper levels of the atmosphere would have in comparison to doing it lower down. My assumption is it would eventually sink to a lower density layer, having more or less the same impact.

[plastic3169]

Hate to say this, but manufacturing bitcoin would make the most sense. And hard to see how even that would work.