INB4 chumps discover that cooling hardware in a vacuum is, in fact, quite difficult.
What if me make a heat laser? /s
In deep craters near the Moon’s poles, permanent shadows keep the surface even colder — NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has measured temperatures lower than -410°F (-246°C)
That’s not the issue, though. In a vacuum there is no medium with which to carry the heat away. You can’t send it into the air with fans or heat sinks because there isn’t any air.
At least on the moon you could sink it into the ground. But in orbit you don’t have that luxury. This is a major problem that spacecraft and satellite designs need to work around, and much effort is expended in that department.
Even though space is generally considered “cold,” in the absence of a medium to sink heat into the best you can do is rely on infrared radiation which is not terribly effective.
Seems like the moon would be close enough for our standard IPv6 TTLs to work, but it seems more likely that we will have to abandon domain names in favor of something like IPFS, since it’s a resource locator instead of a location locator. If you were on Mars, for example, you would not want to have to contact Earth every single time you wanted to load a web page. And so you would contact Earth the first time to load it. And then it would be saved locally. And so anybody who requested that page in the future would talk to you instead of Earth.
Sounds like some sort of decentralized federation of server resources. I don’t know, seems a bit advanced. /s
What would they use it for? The 2.5 seconds of latency would be too high for most uses. Cooling will be very difficult with no atmosphere. Solar power will be hard since night time lasts two weeks. Radiation will damage electronics unless they bury them.
No hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, or other types of disasters on the moon. Asteroids are rare enough now that they basically don’t count.
Latency is high but it doesnt matter for data redundancy.
Ok… Data redundancy is a possible application… I will tentatively say that’s a feasible goal, if still probably a stupid one.
I mean, how often do data centers upgrade storage drives? Cause the cost of doing that in space is… unreasonable.
It would depend on how critical the data is and if the cost benefit analysis breaks even or tips in favor of the moon. I would imagine housing state secrets up there would be reasonable, and documents (text files) don’t take up a huge amount of space. Video would be more challenging. But realistically you could probably store all of the Secret and Top Secret documents across a few servers with maybe 5 drives in a RAID config each. Probably even a single NAS-like solution.
I mean, yeah, you could do that.
I’m not sure if it would be better than a secret underground base… But you could do it.
With an underground base you could even have the one connection to it be a hard-line, not wireless. You could construct it with a smaller crew, easier to keep under wraps. And I expect that would still be less than 1/100th the price of building it on the moon.
Anyway, I do think the ultimate off site data storage location is a pretty entertaining idea, i’d bet it could make sense for some things, I just can’t imagine what.
I wonder what the moon’s top level domain name would be?
.luna
We’ve had .moon and .mars since 2009
Because of course they have. All they give a shit about is getting rich on fiat gains. They don’t give a shit why crypto was actually created to begin with. But that’s a whole different rant.
