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this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2025
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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The author should be ashamed of himself for not asking the basic question of how to cool these motherfuckers
edit to add: the comments are all over the cooling issue
The question of how to cool shit in space is something that BioWare asked themselves when writing the Mass Effect series, and they came up with some pretty detailed answers that they put in the game's Codex ("Starships: Heat Management" in the Secondary section, if you're looking for it).
That was for a series of sci-fi RPGs which haven't had a new installment since 2017, and yet nobody's bothering to even ask these questions when discussing technological proposals which could very well cost billions of dollars.
Oh don’t worry, in the second Dyson sphere datacenter they’ll just heat up a metal heat sink per request and then eject that into the sun. Perfect for reclamation of energy.
I know you're joking, but I ended up quickly skimming Wikipedia to determine the viability of this (assuming the metal heatsinks were copper, since copper's great for handling heat). Far as I can tell:
The sun isn't hot enough or big enough to fuse anything heavier than hydrogen, so the copper's gonna be doing jack shit when it gets dumped into the core
Fusing elements heavier than iron loses you energy rather than gaining it, and copper's a heavier element than iron (atomic number of 29, compared to iron's 26), so the copper undergoing fusion is a bad thing
The conditions necessary for fusing copper into anything else only happen during a supernova (i.e. the star is literally exploding)
So, this idea's fucked from the outset. Does make me wonder if dumping enough metal into a large enough star (e.g. a dyson sphere collapsing into a supermassive star) could kick off a supernova, but that's a question for another day.
don't forget you need a hell of a lot of delta-v to get an orbit that intersects with the sun...
just drop it through a hole in the floor of the floor of the dyson sphere
Indeed, people don't seem to know (and it often slips my mind) just how hard it is to toss something in the sun.
there was a dude on LW who convinced himself that because Oort cloud comets move so slowly relative to the sun, it was really easy for them to start falling into it. Problem is you have the other term in the equation for angular momentum , a huge fucking average orbit.
also unless you're dissipating much more heat out at lower temperature, it won't even work as a heatsink because otherwise it goes pretty directly against second law of thermodynamics
if i'm looking at this right, for copper alpha capture is actually still exothermic (by 3.7MeV and 4.4MeV for 63Cu and 65Cu respectively). it's different from alpha process, because in alpha process whatever comes after calcium is two or more beta plus decays away from stable, that is there's already too many protons and next alpha capture only makes it worse, and it all happens too fast for these decays to happen. it's equilibrium process anyway at that point, but barriers are so large it probably doesn't matter
All humanity has to do is scale up those Chinese battery-pack ejection systems for EVs that have been making the rounds lately, bing bong so simple
The author's previous article on the topic sounds like a newspaper article from the late 20th century: sources disagree, far be it for me to decide.
Starcloud's fantasy would be thousands of times bigger than the largest existing space-based solar array (the ISS) and hundreds of times bigger than those ground-based data centers.