> > The planet underneath anything in low orbit also does this, making this argument irrelevant.

> no. Again, totally wrong. You've just stated that a human in LEO wouldn't get immediately cold when exposed to space. Just think about it for a second. And after that plug the numbers in thermodynamic calculator. You'll see your error.

I already did before previous comment. I was also considering adding "don't forget evaporative cooling for human bodily fluids" to previous comment, but it seemed an irrelevant tangent to discussing data centres.

Now, if you plug the mass of a human and the specific heat capacity of water into a thermodynamic calculator, tell me how long it would take for a human to cool one degree?

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%2870+Kg+*+%28specific+...

And that's with the 1 kW radiative losses from being in shadow far enough from Earth to not get meaningful thermal radiation from the planet itself. Even at 500 km, thermal radiation from Earth will still add 200 W/m^2. This is comparable to the thermal paint previously mentioned, whose peak emissivity (and by extension absorption) is chosen to be a different wavelength than the thermal emission of air temperature.

> >Likewise, the fact that convection exists even without the adjective "forced".

> no. Again, wrong. Non-forced convection is pretty small. Use the calculator.

I did, for both humans and GPUs, you saw the results. Humans are the wrong reference class.

In your own words, "Just think about it for a second": a human in humid 40°C air is in immediate danger because then all the sources of cooling have been blocked off. Radiation becomes balanced, I said humid to block off evaporation. Conduction and convection there have the same problem there as radiation. A GPU wouldn't have a problem with 40°C ambient, because it will still be radiating heat, conducting heat, and by conducting heat to the air specifically also convecting it away.