It is late at night, I have just closed my thick TOEFL vocabulary book.
To be honest, it is exhausting. For a 33-year-old engineer, returning to the intensity of “study mode”—much like an undergraduate student preparing for finals—is a genuine challenge. But amidst the fatigue, there is a sense of clarity. This tiredness feels real because I know exactly what I am paving the way for.
Even during my busiest times working on projects at HSBC, I never stopped thinking about the underlying logic of our world. I once wrote in a previous article that human development is constrained by four fundamental elements: Time, Space, Resources, and Energy.
However, through my recent work with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and BigQuery, I have come to realize that this model is missing a critical fifth element: Information (Data).
This led me to an interesting thought experiment: What happens if we rearrange these five elements?
We are currently facing a paradox. On Earth, energy is priced, cooling is expensive, and the scale of data centers is expanding exponentially. Yet in space, Space itself is infinite, and Solar Energy is inexhaustible.
Although it may sound like science fiction now, I firmly believe that top-tier technology companies (like Google or SpaceX) will inevitably deploy large-scale AI computing centers into low-earth orbit. They won’t do this because it is “cool”; they will do it for cost and efficiency.
Of course, as an engineer, I am aware of the massive technical gap that exists. For instance, in a vacuum environment, how do we solve the heat dissipation problem generated by high-density computing? This is not just a challenge for electrical engineering; it is a critical “environmental constraint” that future software architectures must consider.
[Part 4: The Vision]
Once the balance between energy and heat dissipation is solved, space will no longer be a silent wasteland, but a massive, green data processing factory. A natural consequence of this will be a dramatic drop in the cost of space travel. I believe that in the near future, travel between the Earth and the Moon will no longer be a “novelty” for billionaires, but a ubiquitous lifestyle accessible to everyone, much like international flights are today.
Writing this down, I am not discussing a distant fantasy. I am thinking about what role a software engineer can play in the next decade.
This is exactly why I have decided to challenge myself and apply to the University of Tokyo. I do not want to be just a coder anymore. I want to immerse myself in a top-tier academic environment to complete my puzzle of fundamental sciences. My goal is to research “High-Reliability Distributed System Architecture.”
Whether in the financial systems I worked on at HSBC, in the cloud infrastructure of Google, or in the future of space-based computing, the core challenge is the same: building resilient systems in extreme environments.
Consider this: it has been barely a century since the invention of the airplane. The speed of human progress is staggering, and I am convinced that I will witness this vision of space computing materialize within my own lifetime.
However, the ultimate challenge for us is not merely the technology itself. It is about our agency. In this technological torrent, we must not allow ourselves to be passively swept away by the current. Instead, we must strive to be the ones who ride the crest of the wave—defining the future, rather than just drifting into it.
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