It’s even colder in outer space. Mars atmosphere is very sparse (0.6% of Earth pressure on ground level) so you can’t use its atmosphere effectively for cooling purposes.
One thing the Martian got wrong is what the guy above you is getting at, that storm at the beginning can't possibly happen. Mars doesn't have wind like earth does. There might be a way to leverage this for some other form of cooling, some kind of much more fragile heat sink that can also radiate away the heat maybe. Mars has an absolute abundance of a resource we compete over here, land. Musk could build giant heat sinks and configure them so we can see his big dumb face though a backyard telescope.
Andy weir writes good books but he's a bit of an idiot when it comes to science, the fact Mars pretty much doesn't have an atmosphere debunks many things about his book.
I know far too much about Mars
If you think you know it from reading Andy Weir, then no you don't.
If you want to read about Mars from a popular writer that does know a bit of science, try Zach Weinersmith's "A city on Mars", he's the author of the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comics and a pretty fun writer.
You can however use the frozen CO2 at the poles. Sealing the center is a prerequisite anyways and all you need is a steady supply of crushed dry ice, you could run it for centuries without issue.
Space isn't actually that cold, because radiating heat is very hard. The only reason building on mars would actually be hard it because it's far away.
Data centers are fine if we just *force them to be self-sufficient. Their own carbon-neutral power and own internal refrigerants, not (initially) cheap fossil fuels and water cooling.
Space is very cold my friend. The reason why things take a while to cool is because "empty" (empty space is not truly empty at all but for our purposes now we can describe it as such) space being a vacuum contains very little to no matter to conduct or convect heat from you. But the temperature of space in general is very cold indeed. Quite close to absolut zero in fact.
Yes. But the temperature of the space vacuum is very low. Technically, considering you are in an insulated space suit, everywhere in the outer space will be very hot.
Funny things happen with extreme temperatures and extremely low (ie- vacuum) pressures. You can have gasses and plasmas that are thousands of degrees but they're so thin that it functionally comes out as barely any energy at all.
Yes. The vacuum of space is cold, as there is nothing to there to store heat.
Introduce an object though, and it will begin absorbing all of the radiation from the Sun.
One of the biggest engineering concerns for space is heat dissipation.
One of the biggest engineering concerns for space is heat dissipation.
That's true when the electronics are running. Otherwise, even in view of the sun, space structures will get cold. That's why Apollo 13 was at risk of freezing to death.
Same goes for space, yeah it's cold but it's a vacuum so your only option for heat dissipation is radiation which is limited by the surface area of the radiator.
You also get full radiation from the Sun on one side of any spacecraft in our solar system except when it happens to be shielded by a planet or something, so there's a lot of heat to get rid of and you end up needing pretty large radiators.
Not really. Outer space is a vacuum, which happens to be an incredible insulator. You can only radiate heat away and you're constantly in sunlight (depending on where you want to be). It's *much* harder to keep things cool in space.
Something I haven't thought about before, does that mean asteroid mining is super challenging (even once you've got there) because the drill heats up and pretty much never cools down?
Oh, that’s a good question. I guess with the high enough temperature gradient part of the heat will transfer to the drilled medium somewhat fast, but only calculation will tell. It doesn’t seem that different from drilling Earth?
space may be cold technically, but it's terrible for transferring heat since there's so little to transfer the energy to. same reason double wall thermoses are so good at insulting.
The problem with vacuum of space and close to vacuum Mars' atmosphere is that they are better at insulating rather than being a heat sink, i.e. to exchange heat you need a medium such as water.
You need something to conduct heat away, not just something cold. An extremely thin atmosphere like Mars’s would insulate rather than cool effectively. (Being out in space like a satellite would be even worse: you can’t transfer heat to nothing.)
(Please note this is not a defense of building more data centers on Earth, just one of the many reasons why building them in space would suck, too.)
Not educated in fluid dynamics, so ELI5. Would a closed system not work for cooling? Like, a set amount of liquid coolant in pipes made from a good conductor that cools as it travels through the pipes, returns to absorb the heat, and is collected as it evaporates to circulate again. I assume it would take many miles of piping, but Mars seems to have plenty of open land for it. That's, of course, dismissing the challenge of getting it there.
Put a dome around the server racks, fill the dome with a gas medium like nitrogen or whatever is local. When the gas reaches a certain temperature then pump it into the ground until it cools. Once cooled circulate it again. You can add a pool of liquid in the ground too as a exchange medium for a heat sync to the planets crust... Anyone who plays oxygen not included knows this is fine for a few thousand years until the planet overheats lol.
Update... I ran this through my local AI and I was informed Mars's crust is a very poor conductor and you would need approx 2 million square feet (45.9 acres) of thermal heat sync pipes for a small server room. So, it can work for a starter setup ,but not for data centers. Damn mars is a frustrating case.
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u/Chadbutler11c 12h ago
Imagine how many warehouses and data centers we could build there!