No. It doesn't matter, unless you postulate that the people left behind have zero population growth and constant energy dissipation, which seems unrealistic?

In any event exponential growth in human energy consumption is physically unrealizable. Eventually the whole solar system resembles a red giant star, and sooner than you might think.

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The point is that anyone who good enough at physics to invent a free energy generator also understands why it must be kept secret. Some secrets keep themselves. That's why you can't buy one even though there are videos on the YT showing how to make them. Like the Philosophers' Stone the point of the technology is the internal transformation it engenders when you actually confront the thing itself.

Why does it seem unrealistic? More than that, you only need one of those things. You could have population growth with declining energy consumption if energy use is moved off-planet (even if the population benefits from the off-planet use), or increasing local energy use per-capita if local population is declining, e.g. because the number of people leaving to explore other planets is higher than the population growth rate.

> Eventually the whole solar system resembles a red giant star, and sooner than you might think.

The universe is a lot bigger than the solar system.

> That's why you can't buy one even though there are videos on the YT showing how to make them.

Uh, nope. That's not why you can't buy one.

Watch the Bartlett lecture.

At this point I'm just repeating basic physics and math at you. I think we both have better things to do with our time. Have a good day.

…put them in space how far away from Earth exactly? If they're too close, the heat they radiate away will end up on Earth again. If they're too far away, latency & maintenance will become an issue.

So put a mirror on the Earth side of it?

> If they're too far away, latency & maintenance will become an issue.

There are many compute tasks where latency is irrelevant. To take a recent example, AI model training. It does not matter if the compute farm is a few light minutes away when the computation itself is going to take days to months.

Maintenance is performed locally. It's not as if you're going to have Earth and then a single solitary server farm on the far side of the Sun. By the time this becomes relevant to planetary energy there are multiple space stations with permanent staff.

It seems whether or not you can keep maintenance staff close-by would depend on the temperatures of those server farms. Yes, the regime in which this could work might be fairly large but remember that we're talking about exponential growth of energy production here and the whole reason behind moving the power plants (and server farms) to deep space was that they were emitting enough heat to affect planet-level thermodynamics.

But it does? I think you're confusing energy density with power density. The former is an integral over time and would be monotically increasing with time since nuclear fusion would allow us to basically pull energy out of of thin (ok, maybe not so thin) air.