Learners Live

Now Tech Moguls Want to Build Data Centers in Outer Space by Tim Higgins

Energy constraints in the artificial-intelligence race are causing tech companies to think out of this world. The world’s richest men are earnestly talking about traveling to outer space to build gigantic data centers to run artificial-intelligence models among the stars. They argue such missions make the most sense for powering energy-hungry operations. Such talk comes as Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket companies are working to make space travel cheaper and routine. It isn’t clear what’s closer to being real: Moon bases or superintelligent AI?  The argument essentially boils down to the belief that AI’s needs are eventually going to grow so great that we need to move to outer space. There the sun’s power can be more efficiently harvested. To be clear, the current economics of space-based data centers don’t make sense. But they could in the future, perhaps as soon as a decade or so from now. Now Tech Moguls Want to Build Data Centers in Outer Space – WSJ

RESEARCH: Tracking the Sun by Berkeley Lab

Berkeley Lab’s annual Tracking the Sun report describes trends among grid-connected, distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) and paired PV+storage systems in the United States. For the purpose of this report, distributed solar includes residential systems, roof-mounted non-residential systems, and ground-mounted systems up to 5 MW-AC.  Ground-mounted systems larger than 5 MW-AC are covered in Berkeley Lab’s companion annual report, Utility-Scale Solar.  The latest edition of the report is based on 3.7 million systems installed through year-end 2023, representing roughly 80% of systems installed to date. Tracking the Sun | Energy Markets & Policy (lbl.gov)

Telling Time – 12-hour time is a very ancient system that traces back to the Mesopotamian empires. They had a cultural fixation with the number 12, used a base-12 numerical system, and divided up most things into 12ths whenever possible – including day and night. The 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night system spread throughout Europe and the Middle East and has defied multiple attempts to change it over the centuries. Also, for anyone curious as to why there was such a love of the number 12, it was because that was how they counted on their hand. Look at your hand. Notice how each of your fingers minus your thumb has three easily identifiable parts to it. They used to count by using their thumb to count each part of the finger, much in the same way we count to 10 using our fingers today. So, 12 was the max you could count on one hand.