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You can't compare soda cans with computational results, we can't teleport soda cans up and down cheaply, but we can cheaply beam data up and down.
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Yes I can, on utilitarian grounds. We do it all the time, sending data centers to space is not zero cost externality.

Please continue:

1. humans use soda cans, that people could do without for 100k years

2. ???

3. Don't put datacenters into space?


"aluminium smelting uses a lot of electricity we should do that"

"data centers use a lot of electricity we shouldn't do that"

"why?"

"computers are different"


for the simple reason that other energy consuming industries have physical products in and physical products out, which is costly to transport from space, while uploading extra corpus tokens and downloading new weights is essentially free from space (compared to the hardware shipping costs).

people have been correctly indoctrinated about global warming and the dominant heating terms coming from excess CO2 concentration, but because of this over-emphasis they neglect the prompt heating that comes with nearly all energy generation mechanisms (from fossil fuels, to solar panels to nuclear energy).

when the whole world starts raising their living conditions, and when a computational race erupts, there is no taming of total human energy consumption.

but what we can do is offload the bulk of computational energy consumption, like training common goods such as LLM weights...




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