Giantism and The Moon Race

The race is on, with the Artemis 2 mission coming as soon at early next month. I'm hoping to see it and future endeavors work well, so humanity begins a long voyage to the stars as a multi-planet species. I know that sounds odd in a blog about minimalist living and self-reliance for rural life, but to me the space program has always been about learning new techniques for doing things here on Earth, about new materials, for instance, that went into cordless tools I use as a DIYer or insulation I use to cut our energy costs. Splitting-maul and Moon rocket? Why not?

I've spoken at length about this with futurist Bryan Alexander, who shares my love for space travel. We are both puzzled by a rejection of human exploration by many on the Left and from the environmental movement. It amounts to a form of neo-Luddism at a time when many nations and companies are pursuing reusable launch vehicles. NASA's big SLS Moon rocket is not, save for the Orion capsule.

What critics ignore is how money is already being made in the heavens and how seemingly silly tourist flights resemble early aviation's first paying passengers. I don't think there's any way to stop this next Space Age, save for a Kessler Event (the film Gravity depicts that) making launches untenable and sends telecom back to the 1960s. 

I'd claim that moving human energy and heavy industry into space would be a godsend for our home planet's ecosystem, especially when cleaner rocket fuels come into play. You'll find a few ideas about that here. As much as I dislike the billionaire associated with SpaceX, he has one thing right: we need to begin moving some of our people and energy off-planet. That does not mean abandoning our world to the slow ecocide currently under way.

At the same time, I've written of his megalomaniacal plans for Starship at my other blog; I suspect the derivative called the Human Landing System (HLS) will prove a disaster the first time it tries to land on an unprepared lunar surface. To me it's as bad an idea as von Braun's Nova rocket of the late 1950s, also marketed to NASA as a Moon rocket when its maker was really trying to build a Mars rocket in disguise and with public monies. Both Nova and HLS would try to land a skyscraper-sized rocket on the Moon.

The current US President, who pays no attention to details save those concerning his enormous ego, is pushing us to land by 2028, the final year (I hope) of his Administration. Doing that would beat China's measured program, which plans to land astronauts by 2030. I suspect the Chinese will make that deadline, and we'll lose an HLS lander or, worse, lives trying to beat that arbitrary date. 

Perhaps Jeff Bezos' Blue Moon, an alternative lander from Blue Origin of less monstrous proportions, can get American (and I hope international partners') boots on the Moon safely and even begin the work of building a permanent settlement there. If we think small about getting there (to stay this time) we might do better than SpaceX's giantism.

By the time we make that next giant leap, we may also have national leadership that is not anti-environmental yet still pro-Space. We may then have both well-funded science and human exploration / settlement happening beyond orbit.

It's one of the things that still gives me hope in a difficult time. 

Reason 11 For Not Building Data Centers Now

A few stories recently caught my eye about moving data centers away from where we live, far away, in fact.

 China's government plans to test space-based data centers starting in 2026, with a rollout of ones with costs as low or lower than earth-based centers slated for the 2030s. Meanwhile in the States, Amazon's Jeff Bezo has hatched similar plans. Not to be left behind by his billionaire rival, Elon Musk wants to use his Starship mega-rockets to orbit data centers. Then there's Google Starcloud, with a test planned for 2027. That system would also depend upon something like Starship to make the venture cheap enough to construct.

At first blush, it seems like a crazy idea, but as I considered the benefits versus costs, it makes sense to move this industry skyward:

• With reusable rocket boosters, costs to orbit per kilogram have dropped radically in recent years. If Starship prospers and others copy its model, we'll see the door opened for very cheap rocket launches.
• We have abundant solar energy in orbit. There's no need for generators, nuclear reactors, or natural gas.
• We also have easy cooling, without using water. Rotate a satellite and you have a solar heating on one side, the utter cold of space on the other.
•  Space-based data centers need not be huge to do their job. They could be a constellation of large satellites that talk to each other, as Starlink does already. Right now, however, big centers seem to be the model for space-based construction.
• If we do go big, we know how to do this already thanks to the International Space Station. 
• Parts of orbital centers can be replaced with one launch, and the old centers can be upgraded by robots or small enough to burn up on a deorbit. 
• Beaming data to ground stations 200 miles away on Earth is not a problem. We already do this.

My hope is that this technology will mature fast, to avoid more environmental and social disruption on Earth. And closest to home, I hope my County's Board of Supervisors pays attention, before we end up with a huge and obsolete building placed on agricultural land next to residences.

One issue that does bother me, beyond the possible climate-change effects of launching so many rockets?

It's called The Kessler Effect (or Syndrome). Readers may have seen the film Gravity, which one explosion in space results in a cascading set of collisions and, consequently, a massive cloud of space debris hurtling around 10 miles per second, chasing an underwear-clad Sandra Bullock.  

How serious is a collision in space? I once saw a piece of Space Shuttle Challenger's front windows, removed from a mission before the craft's 1986 catastrophe. The section of thick glass was damaged badly by hitting a tiny fleck of paint tossed off some forgotten rocket-booster, perhaps decades earlier. Now imagine millions of these objects, large and small, forming a cloud around the Earth, making any rocket launches an exercise in futility, destroying telecom networks, and grounding human space travel for many decades. Or centuries.

A center as large as Starcloud makes for a huge target, were the Kessler Effect to begin. 

Belatedly, firms and governments are considering ways to mitigate space debris and harden orbital infrastructure. Let's hope they get is right, as they'll only have one opportunity. I'd like to get my data from the heavens, not from Earth with more carbon pollution and wasted groundwater.

image: Starcloud center from Google video 

A Strangely Easy Idea No Writing Teacher Has Discussed

I may be out of the loop here, but I've come up with a simple idea that may be grant-worthy. Yes, steal it. Beat me to the grant. The consequences for students' learning may be too great for me to worry about being the first to put my name on it.

What I propose is simple: a writing environment online with the ease of Google Docs, but with one enormous feature disabled: copy/paste. In that regard, it would resemble the Respondus Lockdown Browser. 

The difference? Faculty would organize their classes and assignments there, as with a learning-management system, but they would pick certain AI tools that could employed at each stage of the writing process. The tools would work only from within the writing environment, and the final stages of each step--from rough-draft to revision to later drafts--would be sent from within the browser to the faculty member, along with how each writer used any AI tools permitted.

In that regard, my writing environment looks something like an educational version of Grammarly that an executive once demoed for me. In that product, all work copied and pasted into to interface would be watermarked and AI tools could be disabled or enabled by the user. I'd put that power in the hands of the course instructor, where it belongs. As students tell me again and again, using AI is simply the norm now, and we faculty are wasting time focusing on detecting plagiarism with AI detectors I don't trust. Time and again, studies I've read indicate that they turn up too many false positives. 

My idea requires some coders adept at building a good client and we'd have to negotiate licensing for AI programs such as Research Rabbit, an LLM, a image / slide-deck generator, and multimedia tools such as ElevenLabs' podcast and text-to-voice generators.

By placing the tools within the writing environment and forbidding copy/paste from outside, drafting by cognitive offloading would no long be an issue. 

I'm currently talking to a few colleagues who run our AI cluster on campus. I hope to have something sketched out, and if we can find the coders and money, tested in 2026.

Creative-Commons Image courtesy of oercommons.org 

Ten Arguments Against Hyper Data Centers

 

We lost the vote in Goochland County; 4 of 5 Supervisors voted to approve a Technology Overlay District (TOD) and Technology Zone that could include data centers. We learned that a likely center would be two million square feet, or 3000' x 200' in size. That's three times the length of USS Nimitz supercarrier or twice the square footprint of the Short Pump Town Center, a huge outdoor mall about 20 minutes from where I live. I've always hated Short Pump and that mall in particular; it was once prime farmland where a friend stabled her horse. It's now a suburban asteroid belt.

The proposed data center is worse. And soon it may be utterly obsolete. I commend to you articles by Bryan Alexander and Noah Smith about why this entire industry could soon find itself in deep trouble and why that matters to the larger economy. 

Other localities will be fighting data-center behemoths that use enormous amounts of energy and water. Their parking lots create heat-islands and they lower property values. It's likely we citizens will be taking the county to court, as plans were modified at the final moment to include 900 additional acres without public discussion. The entire process seemed rushed through, perhaps spurred on by money from industry, before a new Governor in January. She has promised to develop a statewide strategy. I hope so, and perhaps it can preempt the sort of hasty decisions made here. My state has more data centers than any other.

So what are arguments that money-hungry county officials will heed? Quality-of-life issues may help, but I think environmental concerns, sadly as usual, fall on deaf ears. Our nation's brand of capitalism, one I despise, values short-term thinking and profiteering. I'm a Distributist, not a Socialist; I want capital held and decisions made by the largest number of citizens possible. I want data centers small and as rare as possible. 

In any case, here are 10 technical and economic arguments to make with your local officials as you organize against this bonanza. They are based on my remarks at our recent county meeting. You can share these in 3 minutes at a meeting, if you practice! 

1.  AI drives this rapid growth in data centers. 
2. The AI industry is not turning a profit and has shown only limited ROI for hundreds of billions in venture capital and now, risky loans. Subscriptions make up a tiny portion of revenue.
3. The current model of AI relies on “brute force” computing to simulate human reasoning. This method requires huge data centers that drive up electric bills for ratepayers, and it uses lots of ground water. The Microprocessors in data centers need to be replaced every few years, meaning short life-spans for their hardware. 
4. Real “Artificial General Intelligence” (aka AGI or “Superintelligence”) is unlikely with silicon-based semiconductor technology, yet AGI is the stated goal of OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google.
5. Without more powerful new models, investment may well leave this sector, as 80% of firms that have already deployed current AI models have shown no gains in productivity. 
6. While Meta and Google have varied sources of income, other big AI firms are one-trick ponies. If the gold-rush turns into a bubble that bursts, it will harm the entire economy. What would happen in your locality when a data center goes dark, its owner bankrupt?
7. NVIDIA just announced a new Spark workstation that brings hardware-based AI to developers’ desktops. Coders no longer need to send work to data centers for processing. 
8. Soon consumer devices will have this capacity.  When we have AI-on-a-laptop or phone, which is Apple’s goal for Apple Intelligence, the data-center boom will likely go bust. 
9. Does your locality want to build power-hungry, thirsty data centers that may be obsolete in a few years? 
10. Quality-of-life issues are a form of return on investment. Start with that, not data centers.

Image source: first try with ChatGPT 5 for prompt "Generate an image of a two million square foot hyper data center in ruins."