- Test commences prematurely when people are still around
- Test is aborted partway through but then spontaneously resumes when people have started coming back
- Error in design or failure of hold-down structure turns static fire into dynamic fire, moving fire to where people are
These are unlikely, of course, but they are the things we have to seriously think about and try to design out of the system in order to create safe systems.
No one should ever be that close, but it's a worst case scenario within the realm of possibility (people do get themselves into danger sometimes, for example by wandering onto a railroad track when there's a train approaching). I don't think it's unreasonable to reserve the 10 on the 1-10 scale for 'loss of human life'.
I mean, there was that one static fire recently where the rocket broken loose and started flying. This was not for from a populated area. Ok, maybe that was pretty criminally negligent.
Starship already holds the other half of those commitments. I saw some speculation that they couldnt suddenly double their number of Artemis launches. The timelines blasted either way.
Why don’t data centers use gray water more often? Wouldn’t that be better for basically everyone?
My guess is it’s some combination of the infrastructure not existing, the distribution being bad, and the treatment costs not penciling out.
But that feels like the kind of thing municipal utilities could solve with pricing. Potable water should probably be priced differently for residential use than for big commercial/industrial users, in a way that pushes them toward non-potable sources wherever possible.
A fun Texas water fact I always bring up: the entire state’s monthly freshwater use is roughly a week of freshwater inflow into the Chesapeake Bay. Texas would be the 8th-largest GDP in the world if it were a country, and its whole monthly freshwater demand is basically a few months of water that the Chesapeake just dumps into the ocean. (Of course, estuaries make use of the water so it's not just wasted but it's illustrative imo)
Another fun comparison point is yearly Texas uses 0.08% the volume of the Great Lakes in freshwater but ~ 30-50% of the volume of all the lakes in Texas.
We've got a lot of water but it's not distributed evenly and we should probably build some sort of water pipeline eventually so water rich states can sell to water poor states.
Again, this is all just speculation by someone who knows not a damn thing about municipal water management.
> Why don’t data centers use gray water more often?
DCs will just use the cheapest source that meets their needs. If they have to treat greywater and that costs more than municipal potable water, they'll use the potable water. (In part this is utilities selling their potable water too cheaply.)
> Wouldn’t that be better for basically everyone?
No; if it was cheaper for DCs, they'd already be doing it. But it isn't an insurmountable cost -- DCs still pencil with slightly more expensive cooling.
Not all of us. I'm totally fine with water pipelines in exchange for long distance transmission lines for solar power and other such infrastructure like gas pipelines from areas that produce stuff we do not.
Export an abundant resource for a scarcer one seems win/win to me. Kind of the point of interstate commerce.
In my corner of the Great Lakes, we have so much excess natural gas that it is actually being sold for negative prices. So a pipeline to ship natural gas out would be good, but we certainly don't need any pipelines to ship it in.
There is also an excess of electricity (thanks to gas peaker plants), so there are lots of transmission lines being built. (My property has an old transmission line on it, and then a new one perpendicular to that, solely built to try to do something with all the excess gas and then excess electricity being generated.)
So with that in mind... we'd probably rather our lake doesn't get drained, thanks, and is just left the way it is.
They could but that’s more expensive and location dependent. Much cheaper to put the externalities on tax payers and use their potable drinking water at a nice discount. Best: you don’t even have to report usage.
Why? We have 27 quadrillion gallons in lake michigan alone. You could pump millions of gallons a day out and if it just stopped raining it would take 3 million years to drain it. Stop listening to Charlie Berens.
For reference, Yuma uses around 100 billion gallons of water a year for irrigation. The whole state uses around 2.2 trillion gallons per year.
That's 6 billion gallons a day. And if there were a supply of lots of fresh water, you could expect the consumption by agriculture in desert areas to go way up, so yes, it is entirely possible for lakes to get drained by schemes like thus, such as the Aral Sea disaster. Lake Chad and Lake Poopó are examples from two other continents of the same level of destruction.
Sorry but that isn’t your water. Do you own the Great Lakes?
The Great Lakes are part of the United States and Canada. If the United States or Canada would like to repurpose the water within them for some better use then that sucks for you
I one of those people that think that natural resources should belong to the people who customarily reside in an area and have an investment in its long-term health, both of the people in the area and also of the environment.
Grey water would normally get treated and then discharged into a river or lake or other local water body. If you evaporate it at a data center, then you break that local loop. It's really only different from using potable water in that you save a bit on the expense of fully treating it.
Using 1/4th the entire freshwater inflow into the Chesapeake Bay makes it sound enormous. That's multiple major rivers for a bit over 30 million people.
I live near the Potomac and always figured the region was wet enough that water was not a concern. You have me rethinking that somewhat.
Where does your gasoline come from? Most of that usage is for the massive Exxon/etc facilities we have in Houston/Galveston to refine most of the fuel the entire nation uses.
>There's no reason gamblers won't repeat this stunt, until us poor schmucks who just want an accurate temperature reading have to build a fortified compound in order to do so.
The issue here is you'd need a lot more land because any asphalt near a temp sensor is going to give you bad data.
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