I wasn't concerned about signal delay. I was concerned about bandwidth
which is limited by signal-to-noise ratio. I see estimates on the order
of tens to hundreds of Gb/s, which seems too low considering the
enormous information processing rate.
https://itso.int/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/LBA-1.pdf
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rdak1/how_much_bandwidth_do_satellites_have/
Brent
On 1/2/2026 3:36 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Thu, Jan 1, 2026 at 4:08 PM Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote:
//
/> What will these "data centers" do? I can understand doing LLM
training in space, but answering queries in space means
transmitting the data up and down which would be a serious
bottleneck./
*The amount of signal delay would depend on how high the space based
data center orbited, you couldn't put it in low earth orbit but you
would not need to put it as high as 36,000 km in geostationary orbit
either. A polar orbit of about 8000 km would be ideal, its solar cells
would be in constant sunshine and as a bonus it would be above the
inner van Allen radiation belt and below the outer van Allen radiation
belt. *
*
*
*And I don't think an additional fraction of a second delay between
you asking a question and receiving an answer that is caused by
distance would cause much annoyance because I don't think the data
center would need to do a lot of up and down communication with Earth
to answer most questions, it would already have local access to the
data it needed. All the English text in Wikipedia could fit on a
compressed file of 24 Gb, and if you include pictures, graphs and
videos it would be about 200 terabytes, and just my new iPhone can
store 2 terabytes.*
*
*
*John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis
<https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>*
*
*
e5z
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