Could this be about bypassing government regulation and taxation? Silkroad only needed a tiny server, not 150kW.
The Outer Space Treaty (1967) has a loophole. If you launch from international waters (planned by SpaceX) and the equipment is not owned by a US-company or other legal entity there is significant legal ambiguity. This is Dogecoin with AI. Exploiting this accountability gap and creating a Grok AI plus free-speech platform in space sounds like a typical Elon endeavour.
For the sake of an argument, let’s assume "The Outer Space Treaty (1967) has a loophole. If you launch from international waters (planned by SpaceX) and the equipment is not owned by a US-company or other legal entity there is significant legal ambiguity” is 100% true.
To use that loophole, the rockets launched by SpaceX would have to be “not owned by a US-company”. Do you think the US government would allow that to happen?
New info now online. Elon Musk has now confirmed it is about getting regulatory permission for solar panel deployment. These regulation stop deployment at scale. Its cheaper in the future in space (prediction: in 36 months).
He was asked directly during interview: is this a regulatory play?
You cannot escape national regulations like that, at least until a maritime-like situation develops, where rockets will be registered in Liberia for a few dollars and Liberia will not even pretend to care what they are doing.
It may happen one day, but we are very, very far from that. As of now, big countries watch their space corporations very closely and won't let them do this.
Nevertheless, as an American, you can escape state and regional authorities this way. IIRC The Californian Coastal Commission voted against expansion of SpaceX activities from Vandenberg [1], and even in Texas, which is more SpaceX-friendly, there are still regulations to comply with.
If you launch from international waters, these lower authority tiers do not apply.
Untrue. Responsible for any spacefaring vessel is in all cases the state the entity operating the vessel is registered in. If it's not SpaceX directly but a shell company in Ecuador carrying out the launch, Ecuador will be completely responsible for anything happening with and around the vessel, period. There are no loopholes in this system.
This could simply be done by hosting in the Tor hidden service cloud. Accessing illegal material hosted on a satellite is still exactly as risky for the user (if the user is on earth) as accessing that same illegal material through the Tor network, but hosting it through the Tor network can be done for 1/1000th the cost compared to an orbital solution.
So there's no regulatory or tax benefit to hosting in space.
In addition to all the sibling comments explaining why this wouldn't work, the money's not there.
A grift the size of Dogecoin, or the size of "free speech" enthusiast computing, or even the size of the criminal enterprises that run on the dark web, is tiny in comparison to the footer cost and upkeep of a datacenter in space. It'd also need to be funded by investments (since criminal funds and crypto assets are quite famously not available in up-front volumes for a huge enterprise), which implies a market presence in some country's economy, which implies regulators and risk management, and so on.
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.
Impressive!
We're a university lab and published recommendation algorithms. Never knew that doomscrolling could be this addictive this fast, thnx!
Please consider taking an hour and push this to a Github with quick readme. Scientists and developers would get it. We have been building a torrent-based alternative to Youtube for a few years. Not many knowledge out there around operational frontpage algorithm.
How to find a nice SHA1 hash? How do keyword search in this list? Search and discovery of quality are unsolved scientific challenges. Fascinating stuff.
At our university lab we've been working on this for 25 years. Building a search engine is the easy part. Keeping a federated server with a billion users running is unsolved. Creating a fully -serverless- decentralised search engine is possible, you also need self-funding economy. Seems we're one of the few labs worldwide to still make actual operational prototypes of this stuff. More shameless self promotion:
"SwarmSearch: Decentralized Search Engine with Self-Funding Economy" [0]
Really handy to have s search engine to search this webpage with
45,671,926,166,590,716,193,865,151,022,383,844,364,247,891,968 pages and the rest of the web (no spyware, no tracking).
If you’re interested in mass market adoption rather than just proving the theory, you will need to change the name. “LimeWire” is fun. “SwarmSearch” sounds like a biblical plague.
This is a difficult project. The blog post seems to hint at reasonable feasibility, this stuff is hard! We build a less ambitious tool in the university lab: "ASTANA: Practical String Deobfuscation for Android Applications Using Program Slicing" [0].
Would advise to first read the reverse engineering related work. Genetic programming is just a technique best used when everything else has failed :-)
I've read the abstract of your article. I am not much in the field of decompilers. Let alone deobfuscation. It's even hard for me to type it :))
I think it is probably a safe assumption that the kernel binary found on Android devices is not obfuscated. Tho I probably need more research to confirm this.
Thanks for the hints. Of course, it's very very difficult. But one thing I think you missed, is that I'm proposing a "byte equivalent decompilation". And after that, we should go into reading the code readable and understandable.
If we could create a program doing all this, automatically or semi-automatically, it will be great-great because then not releasing the kernel code doesn't matter. I believe if enough effort and time is put into it, there is a good chance we could see such a thing in like 5-7 years.
After that, we might be able to target the binary blobs, the propriety firmwares. Those might have some legal issue, of course. But as long as it is used only to write a FOSS alternative, that probably won't be an issue, I think.
The MIT NANDA lab seems to have a link rot problem.
Their cardinal code repo is also 404. The NANDA Lab also does coding, their publication at AAAI 2025 is titled: "CoDream: Exchanging dreams instead of models for federated aggregation with heterogeneous models" [1]. However, the link to the Github repo is broken. Fascinating paper, sad about the missing code.
Indeed! Advanced countries will and have blocked apps.
For a more extensive discussion on censorship resilient mesh networking, see IETF Internet Standard draft from 2012 [1]. After the Arab Spring there was global hope. Great to see revival of this topic today. Mesh networking is 1990s. The lesson from decades ago was that mesh networking can't be the killer use-case. Users need a reason to install this and allow it to drain the battery while looking for nearby nodes. Mesh networking never broke through the glass ceiling.
Blocking apps is real. Even Amazon killed a side-loaded app [2].
Symbolic processing was obviously a bad approach to building a thinking machine. Well, obvious now, 40 years ago probably not as much, but there were strong hints back then, too.
"AI agent" roughly just means invoking the system repeatedly in a while loop, and giving the system a degree of control when to stop the loop. That's not a particularly novel or breakthrough idea, so similarities are not surprising.
I'm not convinced that symbolic processing doesn't still have a place in AI though. My feeling about language models is that, while they can be eerily good at solving problems, they're still not as capable of maintaining logical consistency as a symbolic program would be.
Sure, we obviously weren't going to get to this point with only symbolic processing, but it doesn't have to be either/or. I think combining neural nets with symbolic approaches could lead to some interesting results (and indeed I see some people are trying this, e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.11589)
I agree that symbolic processing still has a role - but I think it's the same role it has for us: formal reasoning. I.e. a specialized tool.
"Logical consistency" is exactly the kind of red herring that got us stuck with symbolic approach longer than it should. Humans aren't logically consistent either - except in some special situations, such as solving logic problems in school.
Nothing in how we think, how we perceive the world, categorize it and communicate about it has any sharp boundaries. Everything gets fuzzy or ill-defined if you focus on it. It's not by accident. It should've been apparent even then, that we think stochastically, not via formal logic. Or maybe the Bayesian interpretation of probabilities was too new back then?
Related blind alley we got stuck in for way longer than we should've (many people are still stuck there) is in trying to model natural language using formal grammars, or worse, argue that our minds must be processing them this way. It's not how language works. LLMs are arguably a conclusive empirical proof of that.
Yeah, I agree logic and symbolic reasoning have to be _applications_ of intelligence, not the actual substrate. My gut feel is that intelligence is almost definitionally chaotic and opaque. If one thing prevents superhuman AGI, I suspect it will be that targeted improvements in intelligence are almost impossible, and it will come down to the energy we can throw at the problem and the experiments we're able to run and evaluate.
What’s interesting to me is the rise of agentic approaches which are effectively “build a plethora of tools and heuristics” with an outer loop that combines, mutates and assigns values to these components. Where before that process was more rigid, we now have access to much more fluid intelligence but the structure feels similar - let the AI prod at the world and make experiments, then look at what worked and think of some plausible enhancements. At a certain point you’re enhancing the code that enhances the enhancer and all bets are off.
Impressive!
Will you parse the papers in the future? Without citations this is not that usable for professors or scientists in general. The relevance ranking largely depends on showing these older, prominent papers.
(from our lab experience building decentralised search using transformers)
The Outer Space Treaty (1967) has a loophole. If you launch from international waters (planned by SpaceX) and the equipment is not owned by a US-company or other legal entity there is significant legal ambiguity. This is Dogecoin with AI. Exploiting this accountability gap and creating a Grok AI plus free-speech platform in space sounds like a typical Elon endeavour.