Daniel Schien <Daniel.Schien@bristol.ac.uk> wrote:
    > I assume any object in orbit will be hidden from the sun some of the
    > time. So, the machines will require some pretty big battery to go up
    > with them.

Why would we do that?  Make the orbits polar/sun-synchronous.

While GEO is pretty busy, I wonder if there are other interesting orbits.
Obviously, Lagrange points are one set, but are there half-GEO or 2xGEO
orbits that are somehow useful?

One point I got from Geoff Houston's talk on PING which I didn't understand
clearly before was that LEO wasn't just close to use, but that it was much
better protected from radiation.

    > "Data centers are big energy consumers – between 2% and 3% of all
    > global consumption – a rate that is doubling every year."

Back in 2000 the coal industry did a "study" that explained how coal was
critical to Internet growth.  Their modelling assumed every home router used
the same power as a Cisco 7000 series 14U router.

    > The latest was IEA estimating it to be around 220-320 TWh (out of
    > 30,000) in 2021 data and growing between 10-60% over 6 years in total
    > (so let's than 10 CAGR). But it's certainly not doubling every
    > year. That's just completely wrong.

+1
A related number is density: what's the power required/gigaflop?
And when will countries start rating themselves by gigaflops rather than tons
of steel or barrels of oil?

{You down the street from Bistol Aerospace?}

--
Michael Richardson <mcr+IETF@sandelman.ca>   . o O ( IPv6 IøT consulting )
           Sandelman Software Works Inc, Ottawa and Worldwide