I grew up one town away from
this, which won awards for both best and worst architecture, the former from architects, the latter from everyone else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricorn_Centre
> Like the Nigerian Prince emails, its main purpose is to identify marks.
I may be overly-generous to the guy (bad habit, billionaires don't need or benefit from best-faith interpretations of the stuff they do, leads to sycophancy), but I think this may be more like grandiose delusion than a 419 scam.
The continual promises of full-self-driving, however, those definitely seem like a 419: up-front fees for promises never delivered on, repeated again with newer better hardware. What version is the hardware on now?
While yes, I agree Mars appears to have been Musk's long term goals:
> the gigantic Starship Factory and multiple launch pads under construction in Texas, Florida and Louisiana (plus potentially foreign countries) only make sense with Mars.
There's a few other things that also make sense as use-cases for that infrastructure. Orbital manufacturing is already starting to get interesting. I don't want to bet either way on space-based data centres, the research I've seen from Google says that makes sense at $200/kg which Starship can only reach if SpaceX solves re-use and that's clearly difficult but I don't want to say impossible.
If Musk personally wasn't completely toxic worldwide, and if there wasn't all the other new space companies noticing the Egg of Columbus* that is cheap rockets and the potential for comm sat constellations that launch prices enable, I could believe 100e6 people would buy a $50/month service. A common rating for valuation is profit over 20 years, that revenue (not profit, IDK the margin) would be $1.2T.
Many seem to also be doing this with androids around the time he started talking about them, hence how we can buy them and put them to work even though Optimus still hasn't launched yet.
> The reason SpaceX exists is because Elon willed it into existence.
And then sued the government into considering using them.
He's also setting the rules so shareholders can't sue him.
Concentrated power can indeed get a lot more done at speed; it does not say anything about if the things being done more of and faster are sensible, and while Musk used to make bets that seemed to be risky to him but with positive expected return, he's now openly talking about things like wanting the Tesla "robot army" under his control and the chance of AI killing everyone, where it becomes everyone else's problem if he's wrong.
> (It does raise questions about how Elon might manage the food supply to Mars, if that ever happened)
Indeed.
One of the various things which made me down-rate my estimation for Musk's competence was him suggesting someone may want to run the first pizza restaurant on Mars. Like, sure, someone will, but this is so far down the chain of necessary tech it's like me personally pontificating about what I'll do when I'm as rich as Musk is today: If he's thinking about pizza restaurants, one has to ask if anyone's bothered with figuring out how to clean the perchlorates from the soil to get the minerals needed to fertilise the wheat to make the dough for the pizza.
I've yet to see any sign SpaceX have even built a machine for doing the Sabatier process on Mars, which itself is a prerequisite for anything like a Starship-based Mars colony even getting started, though at least Musk has gotten as far as talking about it.
> beside of how easy it is to destroy from orbit the anti-satellite missiles coming out from the atmosphere,
No state has deployed a kinetic or explosive weapon from orbit to strike a ballistic missile or launch vehicle during ascent.
No operational system exists where satellites are used as strike platforms against Earth-launched rockets in real time.
Russia has done ground-to-orbit anti-satellite missiles though.
Any directed energy system shooting up would be strictly easier than one pointing down, not only because of thermal issues and power supply but also because it's easier to hide ground installations than satellites.
> Existence of supposedly cheap land somewhere (with not much infrastructure usually) doesn't help as you put your computer nodes into a datacenter building with all the required infrastructure which cost more than the SV land on a sq foot basis.
This is a terrible argument, given that space has zero infrastructure.
Once you can break a data centre into a million sub-units and spread them over a sun-synchronous orbit or ten and cool them radiatively, you can also spread those sub-units on desert land with no water or electricity and cool them radiatively.
The units on the ground would look about 6x larger because ground experiences night and even deserts have clouds, but their PV also lasts 30+ years rather than burning up every 5 years or so, which means the factory making the PV to supply them is the same size.
The main thing you save on is batteries. Tesla already supplies enough batteries that it can manage a "mere" one million 25kW compute modules.
> And that is without consideration of how powerful a weapon is the energy generated by a humongous field of solar panels in space. Remember Reagan's Star Wars? Nuclear explosions as a source of power for the direct energy weapons like lasers, etc. Well, you wouldn't need the nukes anymore. Just redirect a bit of power from your compute nodes. And as i already wrote, the large transnational companies will have to take care about their own defense themselves https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47981423 - one more "feudal" aspect of the coming techno-feudalism.
While true, attacking up is easier than attacking down. Anything on the ground has a massive heat-sink all around it, the stuff in space does not. Right now, an attack up is already only limited by the supply of adaptive optics to get through atmospheric distortion.
Nothing prevents SpaceX or anyone else from buying up the right to put these things on cheap desert land. They don't even need to own the land, just the right to wheel these things out on a trailer or a helicopter and leave them there.
A desert is significantly less harsh than space. If your radiator is sized for space, it's overkill in an atmosphere.
>If your radiator is sized for space, it's overkill in an atmosphere.
no. Again totally wrong.
The 20-40C air surrounding the radiator radiates at the radiator too. This is why a human immediately gets stone cold in space while not in the atmosphere - our body radiates away about 900W and receives 800W+ back from the atmosphere - our internal heat 'generation has to cover only the difference - less than 100W usually.
You probably meant forced convection cooling. That requires additional machinery. And that additional machinery is a significant part why ground based datacenters such expensive to build and operate.
To the comment below:
>The planet underneath anything in low orbit also does this, making this argument irrelevant.
no. Again, totally wrong. You've just stated that a human in LEO wouldn't get immediately cold when exposed to space. Just think about it for a second. And after that plug the numbers in thermodynamic calculator. You'll see your error.
>Likewise, the fact that convection exists even without the adjective "forced".
no. Again, wrong. Non-forced convection is pretty small. Use the calculator. And you'll understand why datacenters use forced convection.
The planet underneath anything in low orbit also does this, making this argument irrelevant. There's even cheap paints specifically made to be most emissive in the wavelength window the atmosphere is mostly transparent to rather than itself emitting at.
As does the fact that humans are only slightly warmer than their surroundings. A human-sized object at the operating temperature of a GPU would have a net radiative loss in Earth's atmosphere of around 0.9-1.3 kW.
Likewise, the fact that convection exists even without the adjective "forced". Again, replace a human with an identically shaped android at maximum GPU operating temperatures of 80-100 °C, normal (non-forced) convection goes from ~117 W (human) to 0.9-1.3 kW (80 °C) to 1.2-2 kW (100 °C).
> > The planet underneath anything in low orbit also does this, making this argument irrelevant.
> no. Again, totally wrong. You've just stated that a human in LEO wouldn't get immediately cold when exposed to space. Just think about it for a second. And after that plug the numbers in thermodynamic calculator. You'll see your error.
I already did before previous comment. I was also considering adding "don't forget evaporative cooling for human bodily fluids" to previous comment, but it seemed an irrelevant tangent to discussing data centres.
Now, if you plug the mass of a human and the specific heat capacity of water into a thermodynamic calculator, tell me how long it would take for a human to cool one degree?
And that's with the 1 kW radiative losses from being in shadow far enough from Earth to not get meaningful thermal radiation from the planet itself. Even at 500 km, thermal radiation from Earth will still add 200 W/m^2. This is comparable to the thermal paint previously mentioned, whose peak emissivity (and by extension absorption) is chosen to be a different wavelength than the thermal emission of air temperature.
> >Likewise, the fact that convection exists even without the adjective "forced".
> no. Again, wrong. Non-forced convection is pretty small. Use the calculator.
I did, for both humans and GPUs, you saw the results. Humans are the wrong reference class.
In your own words, "Just think about it for a second": a human in humid 40°C air is in immediate danger because then all the sources of cooling have been blocked off. Radiation becomes balanced, I said humid to block off evaporation. Conduction and convection there have the same problem there as radiation. A GPU wouldn't have a problem with 40°C ambient, because it will still be radiating heat, conducting heat, and by conducting heat to the air specifically also convecting it away.
many-many words, going sideways and around as you can't go against the basic thermodynamics facts directly. What is your point?
My point, i'll repeat, is that while 80C GPU will still radiate while surrounded by 40C air, it will be receiving back the radiation from the 40C air, whereis in space it will radiate the same while receiving practically nothing back from the environment. Both cases obviously is considered when in shadow.
To the comment below:
>False
you wasted my time as you don't seem to understand the basics of thermodynamics.
>and also irrelevant as if you let the space based ones go into shadow you wasted most of the point of going to space.
again, you wasted my time as you don't understand the datacenter construction discussed in the sibling comments.
from my point of view, ben_w definitely understand thermodynamics better than you. I'll point out that generally speaking radiative heat transfer from air is not particularly significant locally: it only tends to matter in the details when you're dealing with the whole atmosphere, which on average is a lot cooler. The transfer is also not blackbody radiation, so even then you can't really plug the air temperature into a radiative heat transfer calculation and expect a sensible result.
>I'll point out that generally speaking radiative heat transfer from air is not particularly significant locally:
so, you also think like ben_w that if we put something into a vacuum bottle here on surface on the Earth it will get cool down like in the vacuum of space.
I do not waste words, perhaps read them and you will find out.
> My point, i'll repeat, is that while 80C GPU will still radiate while surrounded by 40C air, it will be receiving back the radiation from the 40C air, whereis in space it will radiate the same while receiving practically nothing back from the environment. Both cases obviously is considered when in shadow.
False as demonstrated in the words you didn't see the point of, and also irrelevant as if you let the space based ones go into shadow you wasted most of the point of going to space.
If the AI is so monomaniacally focused on paperclips (or anything else) to be a threat to us, going to some other planet is simply one of the early steps, but they absolutely will come back to Earth after all other resources have been consumed.
If such an AI can be reliably made to never ever come back to Earth, they were never a threat in the first place. Nobody knows how to fully test an AI's utility function yet, only randomly test inputs and hope the random distribution we chose is helpful; but every time a diffusion model's output is body horror, every time an LLM makes buggy code (and even every time it gets the pelican-on-bike wrong), this is an example of the test distribution not being good enough.
"What if AI doom is all fear-mongering, and we create AI less prone to make up dangerous stuff or mistake buggy goals for real ones" (which is what alignment is) "for nothing?"
Even if Yudkowsky is autistic, you're muddling the condition. Autistic people have a *practical* intolerance of uncertainty in the moment (everything unexpected from a noise to a missed turn can be a jump-scare in their day-to-day activities), but often they're absolutely fine with intellectual uncertainty, unconventional ideas, abstract ambiguity, nonconformity, etc. Indeed, one of Yudkowsky's main things is Bayesianism, i.e. being precise about uncertainty.
Yudkowsky's reported P(doom) is somewhere around 90%, which is very much in the realm of "we might eventually be able to figure this out, *but we're not even close to ready so for the love of everything slow down so we can figure this all out*"; the book title comes from a long tradition of authors noticing you need to beat readers over the head with your point for them to notice it.
Anthropic (like at least also OpenAI), appears to think they can solve the problems that Yudkowsky has found. They're a lot more optimistic than him, but they take these problems seriously.
For his work on AI, Hinton got a Nobel prize in Physics, a Turing Award, the inaugural Rumelhart Prize, a Princess of Asturias Award, a VinFuture Prize, and a Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. Calling him a "patron saint" of "doomerism" is like calling Paul Krugman (Nobel laureate in Economics) a patron saint of "Trump Derangement Syndrome" on the basis of what he says in his YouTube channel: a smart person's considered opinions are worth listening to even if you have not got time for the details, because you can be sure someone else has considered the details and will absolutely be responding to even an i missing a dot.
The problem is that effort spent to reduce the "risk" of creating an evil god who tortures us all for the rest of time doesn't actually produce outcomes that reduces the risk of things like widespread job loss or hyperaggregation of influence and money.
"Oh we'll at least get some side benefit" is not actually what is coming out of the endlessly circular forums talking about the apocalypse.
Even if there was no overlap*, that would be like criticising the green movement for not focussing on working hours and pay like trade unions do.
Different people can care about different things; it's good that each of us gets to focus on what motivates us, rather than all chasing the same thing, because when multiple teams do all chase the same thing typically only the best few of them actually make a difference.
* as it happens, there is some overlap. Knowing more about how a narrow utility function behaves outside distribution is useful for both capabilities and safety. We're not even at the stage of being able to make AI not kill random subsets of the users with bad advice, nor reliably prevent users from falling into delusions of grandeur, let alone giving AI a reliable sense of liberty and the pursuit of happiness to maintain.
Much like a lot of LLM usage burns tokens so that mediocre people can hallucinate that they're doing something brilliant, Yudkowskyism is just a lot of empty verbiage for the purpose of building a sex cult around a plump gnome. Reusing his nonsensical and poorly defined terms but failing to get the benefit of the sex cult really misses the point of the entire exercise.
The people who've made the biggest contribution to creating a better world over the last 50 years have been the Chinese; powered largely by coal and petroleum. And in one of the most ironic results in the 21st century, they're now the leaders in solar panel production on the back of the largest investment in fossil fuel energy in global history.
The comic ran into the same problem as the climate change movement in general - they proposed ideas that generally made people worse off. And if measured in terms of CO2 emissions achieved nothing except pushing wealth creation to Asia. Which, in fairness, is probably appreciated by the Asians.
BYD had release the first plug in hybrid the year before.
The Beijing Olynpics had made air pollution a hot topic in China in 2007-8.
Wind power had accelerated after their 2005 Renewable Energy Law.
Solar panel production rose around this time, taking over the market from European manufacturers when the Financial Crisis hit and they pulled back investments.
So China at that time, was doing all the things on the cartoon's presentation list, and has benefitted greatly from them.
Many people in Europe want to see green energy transition. But no transition is happening in China.
"
“We see addition, not transition,” said Yasheng Huang, a professor of global economics and management at the MIT Sloan School. “China is building alternative sources of energy as well as fossil energy sources, simultaneously. In terms of the global footprint on CO2, China is emitting twice as much as Europe and the United States. I don’t think there’s a transition going on.”
"
What an embarrassingly ill-informed thing to say. But when the guy wrote a book in 2023 about the fall of China, he kind of has to say that doesn't he, even as he lives through the fall of the USA.
He's called out in the sub-head as an "expert" but what is he an expert in? Renewables? Energy policy? No, he's an expert in saying that China is too state-led. Why would an expert in that want to downplay their success, apart from all the obvious reasons?
"
For Beijing to achieve those goals, Climate Action Tracker says China needs "clear targets for coal consumption reduction" in its new 5YP. However, the economic roadmap released in March was not "explicit about how fossil fuels will be constrained," said China analyst Qi Qin of the Finland-based Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air.
Though Chinese President Xi Jinping promised in 2021 to detail a reduction in coal energy use in the 2026-31 plan, it contains "no clear phase-down plan, no clear fossil fuel cap," said Qin. "The language is much more conservative than many people expected," she told DW. One reason is the continued influence of the powerful coal lobby on Chinese government policy.
"
> New Chinese government guidelines on fossil fuels released on April 22 support the view that the country is willing to move away from finite fossil fuels, strengthen energy independence and still achieve its climate targets, says Qin.
> "The new central guideline talks about strictly controlling fossil fuel consumption, reducing coal and controlling oil. It still leaves room for flexibility, but these are concrete policy levers," Qin said of the document, which also indicated a desire to increase clean energy consumption.
Elsewhere Climate Action Tracker on the USA:
> The Trump Administration is pursuing an executive and legislative agenda to systematically repeal targets, policies, and funding for climate change mitigation and science. The administration is actively obstructing the buildout of renewable energy, while encouraging the production and consumption of fossil fuels, completely reversing the Biden Administration’s course on climate action. This is the most aggressive, comprehensive, and consequential climate policy rollback that the Climate Action Tracker has ever analysed.
All of which, even the bits quoted to claim "no transition is happening", support my original contention that all the things mentioned in the cartoon were being strongly pushed by China in 2009. They have only gained momentum since and they've profited from doing so.
I agree that the Chinese 5Y plan is better than the US policy "Drill, baby, drill!". But how much exactly, we will see.
Lets drill more into details:
"
Against this backdrop, coal has re-emerged as a critical stabilizing force in China’s power system. This helps explain the relatively cautious policy signals embedded in China’s 15th Five-Year Plan. While the plan reiterates long-term decarbonization commitments — including reducing carbon intensity by 17 percent and raising the share of non-fossil energy to 25 percent by 2030 — it still stops short of setting explicit timelines for coal or oil consumption to peak. This reflects a deliberate effort to preserve flexibility as Chinese policymakers balance energy transition goals with near-term electric system stability.
In practice, China’s coal production has rebounded significantly. After nearly a decade of supply-side reforms that kept output around 4 billion tonnes annually, coal production rose sharply following the 2022 power shortages and has continued to increase, reaching a record 4.85 billion tonnes in 2025.
"
I would like to note "reducing carbon intensity", doesn't mean reducing total carbon emissions, it's reducting carbon emissions per unit GDP.
This is in strong contrast to EU
"Specifically, the EU has a legally binding headline emission reduction target of 90% by 2040 relative to 1990, with a domestic target of 85% and up to 5% of international carbon credits."
Something that has been largely forgotten about is that it used to be routine to see pictures of smoggy Chinese and Asian cities, this was a problem for them that they solved. I can't help thinking we can't get this kind of preventative action on any large scale, we need to have severe issues first and that's not accounting for longer term/cumulative effects.
"Over the past years, the government has implemented various methods to improve the air quality in Northern China. Sandstorms, which were quite common 15 years ago, are now rarely seen in Beijing’s spring thanks to afforestation projects on China’s northern borders. The license-plate lottery system was introduced in Beijing to restrict the growth of private vehicles. Large trucks were not allowed to enter certain areas in Beijing. Above all, the coal consumption in Beijing has been restricted by shutting down industrial sites and improving heating systems. Beijing’s efforts to improve air quality has also been highly praised by the UN as a successful model for other cities. However, there is also criticism pointing out that the improvement of Beijing’s air quality is based on the sacrifice of surrounding provinces (including Hebei), as many factories were moved from Beijing to other regions."
The US had the same issue and fixed it through federal and state environmental regulation. It just happened in the US 100 years before it happened in china Heavy pollution is what lead to the environmental movement that started back in the 60s and that led to the creation of the EPA and whole slate of state and federal regulation that dramatically improved air/water quality in the US. It was a slow process that took a ton of work to build a movement of support, but it can be done.
We can actually address problems when we want to. It's just pretty slow and requires people to actually give a shit and put in the effort to build support.
The unfortunate comparable here is that all the people who care about making sure their AI is safe, regardless of what they mean by that, are beaten to the market by the people who don't.
I grew up one town away from this, which won awards for both best and worst architecture, the former from architects, the latter from everyone else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricorn_Centre
Even the Prince of Wales hated it.
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