Readit NewsNow that I think of it, a big hydro dam would be perfect: power and cooling in one place.
If you want to radiate away the heat, you are either limited by the Stefan-Boltzmann equation which requires extraordinarily large radiators at any reasonable operating temperature, or have to develop a "super-Planckian" radiator technology, something which while it may be theoretically possible doesn't seem to actually exist yet as a practical technology.
The only other plausible technology I can think of would be to use evaporative or sublimation-based cooling, but that would consume vast quantities of mass in the process, every bit of which would have to be delivered to space first.
Has anyone seen any published work that suggests it is actually anywhere near economically feasible to dissipate megawatts of power in space, using either these or any other technology?
The "robots will do the manual work" story sounds comforting, but it’s not how automation usually spreads in a capitalist economy like ours. Capitalism automates where the return on investment is easiest and fastest, not where society most needs relief. That’s why AI is hitting creative and white-collar work first: you can replace or augment digital labor from a data center, scale instantly through subscriptions, and avoid the slow, expensive realities of manufacturing, maintenance, and safety certification.
Physical robotics is a very different game. Even if the software improves dramatically, real-world robots are bottlenecked by supply chains for actuators, sensors, batteries, precision parts, and the teams needed to deploy and maintain them. We are running out of Material to build just CPU/GPU/RAM, imagine complex Boston Dynamics robots..
I'm reclining right now typing on what would have been in the 1980s an unimaginable hypercomputer lying in my lap, at a cost far less in inflation-adjusted terms roughly that of a ZX80, connected by gigabit-speed links to a world-spanning network of similarly unimaginably fast servers connected by near-terabit optical links. And all this has changed the world in ways impossible to anticipate in the 1980s, ways that look like the most extreme cyberpunk fiction of that time. Who could have anticipated, for example, that politics is now substantially driven by covert bot farms, or that LLMs could seduce people into suicidal psychoses?
Yes, robots are going to be underwhelming for quite some considerable time, just like the ZX81 represented almost no improvement over the ZX80 and so on - each generation represented only a marginal increase over the previous. Solar panels were crap 20 years ago; toys useful only for powering pocket calculators. But they got a little bit better year by year, and small improvements compund exponentially. Now renewables are approaching 50% of electrical power generation in many places, and it's pretty clear that in another 20 years, wind/solar/battery will be the sole generation source for all but the most niche activities.
I expect the robot boosterism of the present day to bust pretty quickly when we see how different their capabilities are from the fantasy. But fast-forward just 20 years, and supply chains adapt much faster than expected (cf. Chinese electric car manufacturing) and the concept of ubiquitous robotics seems much more feasible. It certainly seems likely that if we can make roughly 100 million cars every year, we can make robots at a similar rate. I think it's likely to change the world in ways we can't imagine yet.
People live longer than 20 years, and the average person born today can expect to see perhaps four such technological revolutions. Think long-term.
Demand for Tesla products is tanking.
Demand for humanoid robots not made by Tesla may rocket. Who knows.
The Chinese are massively out-manufacturing Tesla in the electric car market - would you bet on Tesla somehow being better than the Chinese at manufacturing?
The rest as I said is software; given Tesla's consistent lack of success in "Full Self-Driving", would you bet on them outengineering the rest of the world in the software aspect of robotics?
IMHO we need a good telnet replacement that sends signed data. Most people interpret signatures as allowed under FCC rules, just not encryption.