I think that depends on a lot of factors. E.g. will there be a turn around in the US, and if so how fast? Will Europe and other nations increase science funding to account for all the new talent that wants to come? Will that funding be permanent, not just a one time effort?
Also, if the US restores their democracy and also decides to value science again, will the salaries for scientists abroad compete enough to prevent scientists moving back.
To maintain a sustainable lead the money and investment has to be substantial and long term.
Europe isn't the one to watch, IMO. It's China. China has already significantly increased it's R&D funding and in some areas, particularly solar and battery tech, it's world leading.
China also has been playing the long game with the build out of it's technology capabilities. I could very easily see them doing the same for medicine. They aren't afraid of losing money on investment for a particularly long period of time. They are currently thinking in decades and not quarters.
I agree that China is a science superpower and will only improve. That said, I would prefer living under a wester democratic system, so I really do hope that the west picks up what the US drops. I'm totally fine if the west is merely close to equal to China in terms of science.
China also likes to claim it is a democracy because it holds elections.
It is fair to say that the USA is still a democracy, but not because of elections. Elections have little to do with democracy. In fact, if the majority of the population hold the view that elections equate to democracy, you don't have a democracy.
I wouldn't say that elections have little to do with democracy, they are necessary. Though I agree that merely having an election isn't sufficient. A lot of modern dictatorships have "elections". And that's not to even begin to get in to how representation works.
> I wouldn't say that elections have little to do with democracy, they are necessary.
Elections are a useful tool, but not strictly necessary. Obviously in the small scale the people in a democracy can simply communicate directly. As things scale up you do need to, for all practical purposes, introduce a messenger[1] to carry what the people at the local level have decided upon, to compile with all the other local levels. But that does not require elections either, only trust that the message will be delivered accurately and in good faith. Elections are a really good way to select who you trust, which is why it is the norm in a representative democracy, but if in some hypothetical world where someone naturally became trusted by the people and became the messenger out of simple happenstance, that would be just as democratic. The only signifiant feature of a democracy is that the people hold control[2].
[1] Now that you no longer need to travel thousands of miles to talk to another person it is questionable how necessary that remains. However, we've never successfully developed a trust model without face-to-face interaction. As such, we willingly retain a trusted messenger to offer the face-to-face presence.
[2] Which is why the USA is oft said to not be a democracy. Few people in the USA actually get involved in democracy, which then makes it look like a small group hold control over everyone else. However, there is nothing to suggest that anyone is prevented from getting involved if they want to. Choosing to not participate is quite different from not being able to participate. And thus it is rightfully still considered a democracy.
> Creation has progressively been getting easier since the invention of the computer, it is not a new phenomena. This naturally pushes the boundary on what needs to be delivered in order to find paying customers. In other words, creation still is "hard" if you want to succeed.
Only for developers. Outside of software creation is still hard. Global markets giving access to excellent manufacturing sure does help, but software is a bubble.
Creating marketing material has certainly gotten easier as well, it used to require a lot of work to create these spam pamphlets and company documents but today its trivial. Of course those are worthless to society so didn't help GDP but it filled our society with advertisements and spam and filled companies with worthless documents since now nobody thinks before making one.
Iced seems really promising, however, it's a passion project by a single developer. They very clearly stated that their goal is to follow their passions and desires first, everyone else second, and that it will always be a single person project. Their readme even discourages contributions.
Companies using it in production are often forking it as a result, and trying to keep their fork in sync. Ultimately, if the community wants iced to become a major and stable framework, it will have to be forked and a community development model built around it.
And I'm not saying this to disparage the author in any way, their readme even seems to suggest that that's exactly what they'd prefer.
This is silly. Definitely use Iced.rs, no one cares about it’s early pre-1.0 state. It has good fundamentals and is easy to use. 99% of people on here aren’t building anything more than a vanity project anyways.
It's amusing. The left is always accused of "woke" but the ones constantly crying about it are those on the right. The right will even vote against their own economic interests to "stick it to the woke."
Seems to me we need to fix the narrative here, the right are woke obsessed while the left would rather vote on economic principles like reducing healthcare costs and improving jobs (not just availability but also pay and quality).
Can you not just unlock and open the door? Wouldn't that cause it to immediately stop? Or can you not unlock the door manually? I'd be surprised if there was not an emergency door release.
You are being denied the ability to sell to the French government, not denied selling into the market. Just like no one has "rights" to sell to the US government, you don't have any "right" to sell to any foreign government if they choose not to deal with you. And frankly it should be a matter of national security for governments to control the source and deployment of the software they use.
I am not being denied. They are being excluded from consideration for contracts there.
Fascist isn't fair. I shouldn't have said that. Fascism is when the government controls but does not actually own any or enough shares to control the means of production.
What a shame though. Should US exclude foreign firms (France,) from consideration for contracts for the same reason?
No doubt the tariff master has made this all better with cruel tit-for-tat leverage that caused loss for these US firms.
(EU just canceled aspects of GDPR etc, so it's not new privacy law?)
(Edit: Kushner is currently ambassador to France. Why wouldn't they trust US-based communication firms over there all of a sudden?)
Allowing the US to gain such soft power is the issue, not the size of a company. In fact, it would be even better for consumers if there were more standards and companies that compete by building against those standards. The fact that there is only one Microsoft is as much problem for the US itself as it is for others.
In any case, it's absolutely essential that the western world remove dependency on US technology.
Good point - the comms satellites are not even "keeping" some of the energy, while a DC would. I _am_ now curious about the connection between bandwidth and wattage, but I'm willing to bet that less than 1% of the total energy dissipation on one of these DC satellites would be in the form of satellite-to-earth broadcast (keeping in mind that s2s broadcast would presumably be something of a wash).
I am willing to bet that more than 10% of the electrical energy consumed by the satellite is converted into transmitted microwaves.
There must be many power consumers in the satellite, e.g. radio receivers, lasers, computers and motors, where the consumed energy eventually is converted into heat, but the radio transmitter of a communication satellite must take a big fraction of the average consumed power.
The radio transmitter itself has a great efficiency, much greater than 50%, possibly greater than 90%, so only a small fraction of the electrical power consumed by the transmitter is converted into heat and most is radiated in the microwave signal that goes to Earth's surface.
Unfortunately this is not the case. The amplifiers on the transmit-side phased arrays are about 10% efficient (perhaps 12% on a good day), but the amps represent only ~half the power consumption of the transmit phased arrays. The beamformers and processors are 0% efficient. The receive-side phased arrays are of course 0% efficient as well.
I'm curious. I think the whole thing (space-based compute) is infeasible and stupid for a bunch of reasons, but even a class-A amplifier has a theoretical limit of 50% efficiency, and I thought we used class-C amplifiers (with practical efficiencies above 50%) in FM/FSK/etc. applications in which amplitude distortion can be filtered away. What makes these systems be down at 10%?
Nowadays such microwave power amplifiers should be made with gallium nitride transistors, which should allow better efficiencies than the ancient amplifiers using LDMOS or travelling-wave tubes, and even those had efficiencies over 50%.
For beamformers, there have been research papers in recent years claiming a great reduction in losses, but presumably the Starlink satellites are still using some mature technology, with greater losses.
Is the SpaceX thin-foil cooling based on graphene real? Can experts check this out?
"SmartIR’s graphene-based radiator launches on SpaceX Falcon 9" [1]. This could be the magic behind this bet on heat radiation through exotic material. Lot of blog posts say impossible, expensive, stock pump, etc. Could this be the underlying technology breakthrough? Along with avoiding complex self-assembly in space through decentralization (1 million AI constellation, laser-grid comms).
This coating looks like it can selectively make parts of the satellite radiators or insulators, as to regulate temperature. But I don't think it can change the fundamental physics of radiating unwanted heat and that you can't do better than black body radiation.
Indeed, graphene seems capable of .99 of black body radiation limit.
Quote: "emissivity higher than 0.99 over a wide range of wavelengths". Article title "Perfect blackbody radiation from a graphene nanostructure" [1]. So several rolls of 10 x 50 meters graphene-coated aluminium foil could have significant cooling capability. No science-fiction needed anymore (see the 4km x 4km NVIDIA fantasy)
It's not as exciting as you think it is. "emissivity higher than 0.99 over a wide range of wavelengths" is basically code for "it's, like, super black"
The limiting factor isn't the emissivity, it's that you're having to rely on radiation as your only cooling mechanism. It's super slow and inefficient and it limits how much heat you can dissipate.
Like the other person said, you can't do any better than blackbody radiation (emissivity=1).
Lets assume an electrical consumption of 1 MW which turned into heat and a concommitant 3 MW which was a byproduct of acquiring 1 MW of electrical energy.
So the total heat load if 4 MW (of which 1 MW was temporarily electrical energy before it was used by the datacenter or whatever).
Let's assume a single planar radiator, with emissivity ~1 over the thermal infrared range.
Let's assume the target temperature of the radiator is 300 K (~27 deg C).
What size radiator did you need?
4 MW / (5.67 * 10 ^ -8 W / ( m ^2 K ^4 ) * 300 K ^4) = 8710 m ^2 = (94 m) ^2
so basically 100m x 100m. Thats not insanely large.
The solar panels would have to be about 3000 m ^2 = 55m x 55m
The radiator could be aluminum foil, and something amounting to a remote controlled toy car could drive around with a small roll of aluminum wire and locally weld shut small holes due to micrometeorites. the wheels are rubberized but have a magnetic rim, on the outside theres complementary steel spheres so the radiator foil is sandwiched between wheel and steel sphere. Then the wheels have traction. The radiator could easily weigh less than the solar panels, and expand to much larger areas. Better divide the entire radiator up into a few inflatable surfaces, so that you can activate a spare while a sever leak is being solved.
It may be more elegant to have rovers on both inside and outside of the radiator: the inner one can drop a heat resistant silicone rubber disc / sheet over the hole, while the outside rover could do the welding of the hole without obstruction of the hole by a stopgap measure.
As I've pointed it out to you elsewhere -- how do you couple the 4MW of heat to the aluminum foil? You need to spread the power somewhat evenly over this massive surface area.
Low pressure gas doesn't convect heat well and heat doesn't conduct down the foil well.
It's just like how on Earth we can't cool datacenters by hoping that free convection will transfer heat to the outer walls.
Lets assume you truly believe the difficulty is the heat transport, then you correct me, but I never see you correct people who believe the thermal radiation step is the issue. It's a very selective form of correcting.
Lets assume you truly believe the difficulty is the heat transport to the radiator, how is it solved on earth?
> Lets assume you truly believe the difficulty is the heat transport, then you correct me, but I never see you correct people who believe the thermal radiation step is the issue
It's both. You have to spread a lot of heat very evenly over a very large surface area. This makes a big, high-mass structure.
> how is it solved on earth?
We pump fluids (including air) around to move large amounts of heat both on Earth and in space. The problem is, in space, you need to pump them much further and cover larger areas, because they only way the heat leaves the system is radiation. As a result, you end up proposing a system that is larger than the cooling tower for many nuclear power plants on Earth to move 1/5th of the energy.
The problem is, pumping fluids in space around has 3 ways it sucks compared to Earth:
1. Managing fluids in space is a pain.
2. We have to pump fluids much longer distances to cover the large area of radiators. So the systems tend to get orders of magnitude physically larger. In practice, this means we need to pump a lot more fluid, too, to keep a larger thing close to isothermal.
3. The mass of fluids and all their hardware matters more in space. Even if launch gets cheaper, this will still be true compared to Earth.
I explained this all to you 15 hours ago:
> If this wasn't a concern, you could fly a big inflated-and-then-rigidized structure and getting lots of area wouldn't be scary. But since you need to think about circulating fluids and actively conducting heat this is much less pleasant.
You may notice that the areas, etc, we come up with here to reject 70kW are similar to those of the ISS's EATCS, which rejects 70kW using white-colored radiators and ammonia loops. Despite the use of a lot of exotic and expensive techniques to reduce mass, the radiators mass about 10 tonnes-- and this doesn't count all the hardware to drive heat to them on the other end.
So, to reject 105W on Earth, I spend about 500g of mass; if I'm as efficient as EATCS, it would be about 15000g of mass.
By saying that something is impossible to do cost-effectivey, one is implicitly claiming they have rigorously combed through the whole problem space, all possible configurations and materials, and exhaustively concluded it is not possible cost-effectively.
Imagine now instead of a pyramid, a cone. Imagine the cone is spinning along its symmetry axis. One now has a local radial pseudoforce, a fake gravitational force along the radial direction (away from the symmetry axis).
Now any fluid with a liquid-gas phase transition above the desired radiator temperature but below the intended maximum compute operating temperature (and there is a lot of room for play for fluid choice because the pressure is a free parameter) can be chosen to operate in heat-pipe fashion. Suppose you place the compute at a certain point along the outer rim of the cone, and fluid that condenses on the cone wall will flow to the circular rim at the base. the compute is inside a kind of "chimney" and the lower half of the chimney (and the compute in it) are submerged by the fluid. The fluid boils and vaporizes, and rises up the chimney and is piped to the central axis and flows out in a controlled distributed fashion. all of the pipes could be floppy aluminum foil (or mylar etc.) pipes, since they are all pressurized during normal operation.
Some of the liquid phase could be pumped up to the central axis at the base and cool the rear side of the solar panels as well. I don't see the problem. The power density of solar panel heating (and thus power density on the cone surface) are very similar and perfectly manageable with phase-transition cooling /condensing.
At some point you are just prodding until people hand you working designs on a silver platter.
Yes, graphene appears to offer a negligible improvement over other kinds of paints based on black carbon, e.g. Vantablack.
The research article linked above does not claim a better emissivity than Vantablack, but a resistance to higher temperatures, which is useful for high temperature sensors (used with pyrometers), but irrelevant for a satellite that will never be hotter than 100 Celsius degrees, in order to not damage the electronic equipment.
Well acttshually, it's 100% efficient. If you put 1W in, you will get exactly one watt out, steady state. The resulting steady state temperature would be close to watts * steady state thermal resistance of the system. ;)
I don't think you could use "efficiency" here? The math would be based on thermal resistance. How do you get a percentage from that? If you have a maximum operating temperature, you end up with a maximum operating wattage. Using actual operating wattage/desired operating wattage doesn't seem right for "efficiency".
What radiators look like is foil or sheet covering fluid loops to spread the heat, control the color, and add surface area.
They are usually white, because things in a spacecraft are not hot enough to glow in visible light and you'd rather they not get super hot if the sun shines on them.
The practical emittance of both black paint and white paint are very close to the same at any reasonable temperature-- and both are quite good, >90% of this magical material that you cite ;)
Better materials -- with less visible absorption and more infrared emittance -- can make a difference, but you still need to convect or conduct the heat to them, and heat doesn't move very well in thin materials as my sibling comment says.
The graphene radiator you cite is more about active thermal control than being super black. Cheap ways to change how much heat you are dumping are very useful for space missions that use variable amounts of power or have very long eclipse periods, or what move from geospace to deep space, etc. Usually you solve it on bigger satellites with louvers that change what color they're exposing to the outside, but those are mechanical parts and annoying.
Aluminum foil of great surface will not work very well, because the limited conductivity of a thin foil will create a great temperature gradient through it.
Thus the extremities of the foil, which are far from the satellite body, will be much cooler than the body, so they will have negligible contribution to the radiated power.
The ideal heatsink has fins that are thick close to the body and they become thinner towards extremities, but a heatsink made for radiation instead of convection needs a different shape, to avoid a part of it shadowing other parts.
I do not believe that you can make an efficient radiation heatsink with metallic foil. You can increase the radiating surface by not having a flat surface, but one covered with long fins or cones or pyramids, but the more the surface is increased, the greater the thermal resistance between base and tip becomes, and also the tips limit the solid angle through which the bases radiate, so there must be some optimum shape that has only a limited surface increasing factor over the radiation of a flat body.
> I do not believe that you can make an efficient radiation heatsink with metallic foil.
What radiators look like is foil or sheet covering fluid loops to spread the heat, control the color, and add surface area.
In general, radiators are white because there's no reason for them to absorb visible light, and they're not hot enough to radiate visible light. You want them to be reflective in the visible spectrum (and strongly absorptive/emissive in the infrared).
A white surface pointing at the sun can be quite cool in LEO, < -40C.
If you need linearity for spectral efficiency, you pay for it.
30% power added efficiency is the state of the art up in Ku band if you need a low compression budget. And it's important to note that this doesn't include the substantial power spent in modulation of complex signals or the power conversion, etc, before the transmitter. Or, the power lost in the connection to the antenna and its matching-- can easily exceed 2dB.
I think you missed the point. If you have a 100 MW communicstion satellite and a 100 MW compute satellite those are very different beasts. The first might send 50% of the energy away as radio communication making it effectively a 50 MW satellitefor cooling purposes.
No, they didn't. You can't "send away" thermal energy via radio waves. At the temperatures we're talking about, thermal energy is in the infrared. That's blackbody radiation.
Nobody describes a satellite by specifying the amount of heat that it produces, but by the amount of electrical energy that it consumes.
In a communication satellite, a large fraction of the consumed electrical energy goes into the radio transmitter. Radio transmitters are very efficient and most of the consumed power is emitted as radio waves and only a very small part is converted into heat, which must be handled by the cooling system.
So in any communication satellite, a significant fraction of the consumed energy does not become heat.
Your answer makes it seem like you too missed the point. If a Starlink sends a 1000W signal to Earth, that is 1000W of power that does not heat the satellite.
First of all, the current government doesn't give a shit about the first amendment and is successfully putting a chilling effect on it through various means. Both through illegally using government funding as a hammer to require independent companies to curtail their speech, or by using regulation.
Second, history will look back and realize that without taking into account the volume of your voice, you don't really have free speech in a way that matters. If you the person next to you can use a megaphone that is so loud that no one hears you, you effectively have no speech. A great many democracies implicitly realize this and thus have election spending limits tied to the number of supporters. The US, through it's lobby system, and through party affiliated control of third party networks, does not.
Baseless accusations, because what bothers night people in the morning, bothers morning people in the night.
The only real difference is how much you care about how your actions impact the environment and people around you.
I wake up early, because I work early, I don't make any sound, my flatmate (I rent a room from the company) works late and always stays up late, they make so much noise that they keep waking me up to the point that I had to report them to the company.
It doesn't matter if you're a night or a morning person, what matters is, are you considerate or not.
Considerate people will be considerate at any time of the day, but there are a lot more checks and balances to keep the inconsiderate at bay at night (e.g. noise bylaws). They soon learn that they have to become considerate. Conversely, anything goes for the inconsiderate morning crowd.
As a collector of off kilter bigotry, I love finding new forms of it. Gave me a smile thinking about how much you must have nursed this grudge against morning people (they are a judgey holier than thou group on average). The particular group I harbor bigotry towards is car drivers with tinted front windows, which I find to display anti social behaviors as a group.
Also, if the US restores their democracy and also decides to value science again, will the salaries for scientists abroad compete enough to prevent scientists moving back.
To maintain a sustainable lead the money and investment has to be substantial and long term.