As a thought experiment, if humanity wanted to go all in on trying to move industrial processes and data centers off planet, would it make more sense to do so on the moon?

The moon has:

- Some water

- Some materials that can be used to manufacture crude things (like heat sinks?)

- a ton of area to brute force the heat sink problem

- a surface to burry the data centers under to solve the radiation problem

- close enough to earth that remote controlled semi-automated robots work

I think this would only work if some powerful entity wanted to commit to a hyper-scale effort.

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BurningFrog 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The Moon also has 14 day long nights, while space has permanent sunlight for your solar panels.

I suspect this is really the fundamental idea behind this whole plan.

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snewman 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Water on the moon is limited and difficult to collect, it wouldn't make sense to use it for industrial purposes. It's a very challenging thermal environment (baking during the day, freezing at night). But perhaps worst of all, every month there's a 14-day period with no solar power. Overall seems worse than low-earth orbit.

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munchler 10 hours ago | parent [-]

> every month there's a 14-day period with no solar power

So it's dark 50% of the time on the moon... just like here on Earth.

	▲	foxglacier 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		... and completely not like a sun-synchronous Earth orbit which is dark 0% of the time.

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vidarh 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Probably a lot easier, but the moon looses a major selling point of data centres in space, namely reasonable latency. To be clear, I don't think it's a good idea. But I think that specifically the way Musk is trying to position it, the moon would be an even harder sell.

	▲	TacticalCoder 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> But I think that specifically the way Musk is trying to position it, the moon would be an even harder sell. I agree. I would be quite a moonshot.

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DaedalusII 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

it could be easier just to build in orbit. its a lot closer, sites can be positioned above various geographic locations as required.

i think the moon likely does contain vast mineral deposits though. when europeans first started exploring australia they found mineral anomalies that havent existed in europe since the bronze age.

the Pilbara mining region is very cool. it contains something like 25% of the iron ore on earth, and it is mostly mined using 100% remote controlled robots and a custom built 1000 mile rail network that runs 200-300 wagon trains, mostly fully automated. it is the closest thing to factorio in real life. 760,100 tonnes a year of iron ore mined out and shipped to China.

	▲	rswail 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And Fortescue and others are working on BEV vehicles for those giant Tonka trucks that move the raw ore to the processing areas at the top of the opencut. They were also working on a "zero energy" train that would run "downhill" from the mines to the ports to charge its batteries that would then take the empty train back to the mine. Battery tech wasn't sufficient (yet), but that doesn't mean it can't come back when solid state and sodium ion batteries come online.

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strangeloops85 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The elephant in the room for all lunar scenarios is lunar regolith. Even ignoring the toxicity to humans (big problem and will happen quite quickly for any humans there!), it will be a big long-term problem for robots and machinery in general.

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hahahahhaah 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Best bet is to put the servers in a rocket, go around the moon then land back on earth. Then install them in USE1.

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vel0city 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What if instead we moved it all to a closer rock that has even more water, even more materials to manufacture crude (and even advanced) things, even more surface, more protection from radiation, and even crazier still had significantly less launch costs?

Almost any reason why the moon is better than in orbit is a point for putting it on earth.

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bs7280 14 hours ago | parent [-]

I think there's something to be said about imagining a future where we can keep the earth clean of all the nasty industrial processes we have grown accustomed to living next to. A big part about this proposed idea is that you could do a lot of manufactoring in space.

I have long theorized there will be some game changing manufacturing processes that can only be done in a zero gravity environment. EX:

- 3d printing human organ replacements to solve the organ donor problem

- stronger materials

- 3d computer chips

I do not work in material science, so these crude ideas are just that, but the important part I'm getting at is that we can make things in space without any launches once that industry is bootstrapped.

	▲	chuckadams 14 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Human organs manage to grow pretty well in 1G. In fact, they're almost certainly going to be terrible at it in zero g.
	▲	vel0city 14 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		We're able to make 3D computer chips on Earth today, and I don't know about you but all my organs managed to get made just fine on Earth. Doesn't seem like we need zero g to do either of these things. Either way, this isn't about 3D printing organs, this is about launching AI compute into space. To do important stuff, like making AI generated CSAM without worry of government intervention.