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Respect the 2.7K sink point β yes, you don't burn electricity reversing entropy like on Earth. But "radiators the size of a skyscraper and it doesn't matter" is exactly where it breaks, math: Radiative cooling is capped by Stefan-Boltzmann: P = Ξ΅ΟA(T4βT04). A 300K radiator to deep space tops out at ~400 W/m2. That's the ceiling, not "a lot." So your "skyscraper" radiator (5000 m2) at 300K radiates only ~2 MW β and weighs ~40t dead. Vacuum is necessary, it's not the resource you save. In LEO the scarce resource is launch mass, $/kg. You still need material to build the radiator. This is the thread's actual topic: data centers. A 1 GW facility needs ~2.4 km2 of radiator (~19,000t) β bigger than the building itself. Which is why nobody does orbital data centers. "Make it bigger and it doesn't matter" is precisely the intuition that fails: area = mass = cost, with a hard cap on W/m2. The only thing you nailed: radiative cooling IS passive. Passive β free capacity. You can only dump ~400 W/m2. Want more? Crank the radiator hotter β now you're managing thermal stress and material limits, back to square one.
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