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Put a data center on the moon?
- j_timberlake 2y agoHow much could we save on transportation costs by bringing the moon closer? Or building a 2nd moon that's closer?
- duxup 2y agoI wonder how many places on earth you can put things for the cost of putting it on the moon?
- EA-3167 2y agoIf we're talking about the surface of the Earth (i.e. no clever "In the core" stuff) then... everywhere. And by surface lets say that we're talking about everything from the seafloor to the upper atmosphere. It would probably be cheaper to put it in the caldera of an active volcano than on the Moon. You could certainly get a bathysphere full of archival tape to the bottom of the Challenger Deep for less than you could get the same on the Moon.
- ben_w 2y agoAt current prices, I think the moon is about as expensive as getting into Fort Knox by force. Probably about as survivable, too. Starship, if they solve the remaining issues before politics catches up with them, could solve the first problem. I've seen some interesting ideas for contact-free drilling that might help with the second, but for now they're experimental* — we've got a lot of things in space tech that need R&D spending, which is a great opportunity on a forum like Hacker News, but does mean dreamers like me need to wait. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaise
- david_draco 2y agoYes. Meteorites are being systematically collected to get impact statistics in areas that are tectonically undisturbed. They seem equally good places: Antarctica, Atacama desert, Greenland. In terms of bandwidth and maintainance they seem preferable to the moon. See the Arctic Code Vault in Svalbard.
- Johnny555 2y agoThat's what I was thinking. >Lonestar’s CEO Christopher Stott says it is to protect sensitive data from Earthly hazards. If storing your data into 2 or 3 datacenters spread across the planet isn't safe enough from disaster, it's not clear that the moon will be any better since after a global disaster that destroys all copies of the data, it's likely that there will be no one left on earth that still needs or wants that data.
- beardyw 2y ago"lunacy" Middle English: from Old French lunatique, from late Latin lunaticus, from Latin luna ‘moon’ (from the belief that changes of the moon caused intermittent insanity).
- abe94 2y agoI'd hope the writer or editor used lunacy for this reason haha
- codetrotter 2y agoThey did. And now the title on HN has been edited down to remove this most exquisite pun :'(
- perihelions 2y agoThe editor flew too close to the sun and got their title clipped :(
- anotherhue 2y agoOil rigs seem a smarter move. You can piggy back on their enormous investment, and use water cooling.
- metalmangler 2y agooil rig would be perfect, position it over one of the cold currents than make up the global "conveyor belt" heat transport system, and enjoy limitless water @3~4°c to cool any sized data cluster.....position it just right, and the rig can just tap into a natural gas resevoir and use that to power the data cluster, pumps, stuff, whatever, stick some giant wind turbines out there, paint them yellow, make everybody happy
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoI wonder why they don't do that? Maybe the square footage is terrifically expensive.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y agoSome of these arguments seem weird. Like yes, it's very cold, but it also has no atmosphere, so it's very hard to bleed the heat away. Is the fact that the moon isn't protected from radiation and covered in impact craters not indicative of its poor suitability?
- barbarr 2y agoNope you're wrong. Lonestar has this all figured out. They even have a landing page and dramatic promo video, which is a clear sign of how much due diligence they put in after receiving their oversubscribed $5M seed investment.
- nickpeterson 2y agoOnly one man would dare give him the raspberries.
- cozzyd 2y agonot having an atmosphere also means way higher data corruption rate...
- eru 2y agoThe proposal has many problem, but I don't think this is one of them: Bury your computers under a few metres of regolith. Gravity on the moon is only a sixth of earth's, so it's relatively easy to pile up or dig down.
- wincy 2y agoIf you want it cold, just put your datacenter in Antarctica. Be right back, getting my YCombinator pitch deck ready.
- eru 2y agoPeople already put datacentres in Iceland.
- M95D 2y ago> Some parts of the moon are permanently shadowed and therefore extremely cold, as low as -173 °C. This means that no energy or water would need to be expended to cool the data center. That doesn't sound right to me. If there's no air, then only black body radiation can be used to cool the data center. That means a massive radiator, a lot larger than a heat-to-air radiator+fan used on earth.
- dekhn 2y agoI agree (problem for satellites), but then I wondered if you could dissipate the heat into the ground in a large area.
- perihelions 2y agoIsn't moon sand a very high thermal insulator? edit: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9646997/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9646997/ ("Thermophysical properties of the regolith on the lunar far side revealed by the in situ temperature probing of the Chang’E-4 mission") Comparing against reference tables, it's more insulating than rock wool insulation, https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/thermal-conductivity-d_429.html https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/thermal-conductivity-d_42...
- JoeAltmaier 2y agoConduction through the ground? Or run coolant through buried pipes. Just a pump; no significant energy to cool, just move the coolant.
- duskwuff 2y agoI'm surprised that, somehow, the article barely even touches upon the question of bandwidth. Terrestrial data centers often have hundreds of gigabits per second of transit - how much bandwidth would be available to this lunar data center, to what endpoint, and how reliable will that be? (Would one of these permanently shadowed areas of the moon even have line-of-sight to the Earth's surface, or would it have to be relayed through a satellite?)
- hollasch 2y agoIf you have a problem that requires and hour or a day to compute, then spending fifteen minutes for data transfer up and down (particularly in the face of lowered costs) is often a profitable trade. Movie studio render farms are a classic example of such compute jobs. Weather or geological resource prediction could be another. There are many such high-compute jobs in practice.
- daedrdev 2y agoThey are also probably a minute fraction of jobs though.
- duskwuff 2y agoNot only are those jobs relatively rare, but they also require a lot of hardware and a lot of power. Both of those are going to be in short supply. (Solar power requires sunlight, and the target locations are deliberately in shadow.)
- solid_fuel 2y agoThe transit is even worse than that, right? The moon orbits the earth so at different times of day it is over different parts of the earth's surface. So the route is not only constantly changing, but sometimes you have to go around the entire earth (either via satellite relay or fiber) and then cover the distance from the earth to the moon on top of that. It's hard to imagine any scenario where this proposal really makes sense.
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- Animats 2y ago"According to the United Nations’ 1967 outer space treaty, space and the moon are “not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty,” and as such poses a loophole for data sovereignty laws." That will probably work about as well as the proposal to put a data center on Sealand [1]. Or Cryptoland. Or Satoshi Island. Or Blueseed.[2] Or the Space Kingdom of Asgardia, which launched a successful satellite with some data storage in 2017.[3] That lasted until 2022, when the satellite re-entered. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueseed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueseed [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asgardia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asgardia
- tzs 2y agoIt might have a better chance that those ocean-based proposals. There are a lot of countries with navies that could just happen to decide to conduct a live fire training exercise in the general area as your ocean facility and just happen to have an accident that takes you out, with enough plausible deniability that they probably would not get in any serious trouble over it. There are a much fewer number of countries that could take out a lunar facility and I don't think any could do it in a way that has any plausible deniability.
- bawolff 2y ago> There are a much fewer number of countries that could take out a lunar facility and I don't think any could do it in a way that has any plausible deniability. Sure, but if the goal is to get around copyright law, i think the usa would be very happy to do it. No plausable deniability needed.
- eru 2y ago> There are a lot of countries with navies that could just happen to decide to conduct a live fire training exercise in the general area as your ocean facility and just happen to have an accident that takes you out, with enough plausible deniability that they probably would not get in any serious trouble over it. Why would countries not already do the same thing to commit high seas piracy today?
- Havoc 2y agoVery weird pitch. There are datacenters in nuclear bunkers and all the major providers let you do redundant copies across continents. So what exactly is the threat model here? Astroid pulverises earth but moon somehow stays ok? >it’s impossible to accommodate all potential customers in any one location, except in outer space Extra territorial jurisdiction is a thing so don't think outer space treaty on sovereignty will help. Could just as well put it on the antarctic and that works better on cooling too. It's cool as an experiment ofc but doesn't seem to make any sense.
- 9cb14c1ec0 2y agoExactly. It doesn't solve data sovereignty in a practical way for anything other than backups, and even that could be debated. At the end of the day, everyone still wants low-latency access to their data.
- paranoidrobot 2y ago> It doesn't solve data sovereignty in a practical way for anything other than backups In my experience, customers who have specific requirements about data sovereignty are also explicitly including backups in those requirements.
- undedone 2y agoBet you lag time will be a bitch
- einpoklum 2y agoIf your data center needs extend as far as the moon, you're probably splurging too much with those things.
- Henchman21 2y agoListen the new `luna-1` AWS availability zone will only make my resume look amazing. I'm not even splurging with my own money so whats the big deal?
- fjjjrjj 2y agoWhy not Prudhoe Bay, AK? Cheap access to natural gas for fuel that is flared off anyways, and sub-40F high temps for 9 months a year.
- josefritzishere 2y agowas there ever a solution to the static dust problem that plagued previous moon missions?
- barbazoo 2y agothat's an implementation detail
- okdood64 2y agoWould be need to put a datacenter there and cache static type websites (NYT, etc) to lower latency.
- mlhpdx 2y agoWell, he’s going to need a lot of electricity (and so will converting regolith to oxygen for NASA) so who’s in on starting Lunar Power with me?
- procaryote 2y agoI like to believe the best of people, and if so, this might be a sincere idea sprouted in soil unburdened by knowledge. I fear however that it's more likely to be a grift
- whalesalad 2y ago[RESOLVED] AWS Lunar Region (us-moon-1) – Service Disruption
- catlikesshrimp 2y agoWhy don't they build a datacenter below sea water on earth? There is so much water to cool the system and I bet they can arrange some sort of one directional water flow with no energy expenditure. Solar panels can provide the electricity for the datacenter. Those will be installed in the nearest shore (sea water destroys even solar panels)
- softfalcon 2y agoWe can barely tolerate the latency and throughput limitations between Europe and the US for data center processing... and now we're okay with data being wirelessly transmitted (read: super slow) from Earth to the Moon? Building something on the moon would be cool, but a data center? Unlikely.
- debesyla 2y agoUntil we make a really long USB-C cable. ...or, just, use the moon servers as an extreme form of backups only. Rarely used, used only for the essential data.
- nofunsir 2y agowe could encode it into true solid state form, maybe in the form of a giant rectangular monolith, and bury it...
- smitelli 2y ago> super slow $ units Currency exchange rates from FloatRates (USD base) on 2022-12-14 3753 units, 113 prefixes, 120 nonlinear units You have: (2 * 238854 mi) / c You want: ms * 2564.4291 / 0.00038995034 Over 2.5 seconds round trip. And just imagine the on-call shifts. "Sorry honey, PDU failed. I'll be back four days after the next-next launch window opens."
- svilen_dobrev 2y agoYes! And run there all autonomous ad+slop+BS-generators on one hand , and all the autonomous personal-electric-monks-that-are-to-be-irradiated-with-that on the other hand - with minimal latency and maximal throughput. And leave us here in peace..
- yesthis 2y agoYou'd need something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Control_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Contro... Probably better to just do it in Greenland.
- femiagbabiaka 2y ago> Over 100 countries worldwide have laws that restrict where certain data can be processed and stored, often to within that country itself. As a data center provider, it’s impossible to accommodate all potential customers in any one location, except in outer space. According to the United Nations’ 1967 outer space treaty, space and the moon are “not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty,” and as such poses a loophole for data sovereignty laws. An American satellite is under American law, but it can carry a black box inside it that’s under British law, or any other country’s. A moon-based data center can host as many separate black boxes as needed, to accommodate all of its diverse customers. Governments seem particularly interested in this prospect. Setting feasibility aside, seems strictly like this is privacy for the entities that deserve it the least. Privacy is for the individual and their "owned" data, not for governments to craft digital black sites.
- nektro 2y agoaside from all the practical arguments listed out in other comments, i simply don't support corporations building in space. space should only be multi-national projects, similar to the way the ISS is managed
- MrLeap 2y agoI can think of a bunch of great reasons to be wary about this, but at the same time it feels inevitable, doesn't it? Biggest reason I don't like it is the fact a big rock lobbed at earth from the moon is one of the lowest cost of entry WMD programs imaginable. Seems like it's only a matter of time before someone deploys their capital to another space rock, convinces people to go with them, and then declares sovereignty of that rock. What comes with that is all the same stories history tells over and over, just again, on a different rock.
- nektro 2y agonothing is inevitable
- MrLeap 2y agoGood attitude.
- genewitch 2y agoYou can drop sacks of money from low earth orbit that would do just as much damage and be way cheaper.
- MrLeap 2y agoI'll take your word for it. I lose intuition for how far away the moon is and how much delta - V it takes to get back to earth. I do think the moon has an advantage from a standpoint that the material is already there. You have to "shoot up hill" to stop the gun from getting loaded.
- zamalek 2y ago> “When you place data centers in environments that are already very, very cold...the performance actually also improves significantly,” Verma says. “Because when you go down in temperature, things like electrical resistance also go down.” Oh, yes yes yes. Until it stops working entirely, that is. Some resistance is part of the design. Ask any LN2 overclocker.
- ElijahLynn 2y agoWait up, this lander is going up in the SpaceX rocket landing on the moon, staying there for 3 weeks, then coming back home? How?
- advilPM 2y ago[flagged]
- advilPM 2y agoI think I solved this problem in a design interview once
- hiccuphippo 2y agoThe moon would mean a 1.25 second latency. Why not just in orbit around the earth? It could be placed on the opposite side of the sun so it's always in the dark if they think that's a compelling reason.
- kej 2y agoI would love to know what data the state of Florida possibly has that needs to be stored on the moon.
- braedonwatkins 2y agosolar radiation immediately feels like a huge problem... the more i think about the scenario the more problems i come up with
- Joe_Cool 2y agoNot only a "data center". Nokia has LTE 4G connectivity for moon local data onboard the lander/hopper Grace. It's supposed to be able to travel/hop up to 100m high with a range of 25km from Athena to dive into ditches with shadow areas. Quite an interesting mission. Landing is scheduled for March 6.
- tediousgraffit1 2y agoEveryone's focused on the dumb 'backups' pitch and missing all the interesting engineering problems people are mentioning as objections against it.
- tantalor 2y agoBecause they're not interesting actually. Engineering is about cost and benefit tradeoffs, compared to alternatives. The "moon data center" does not check any of those boxes.
- JoeAltmaier 2y agoMaybe in orbit. Low latency, cold in the shade.
- 1970-01-01 2y agoThis may be the worst idea I've ever heard. Confidential, until someone builds a lunar rover to crawl into your 'data center'. Alarms would do what? Integrity? Radiation. Moon dust. Micrometeorites. Enjoy beating the universe at its forever game. Availability? Your data is literally on the moon.
- neilv 2y agoBesides the technical feasibility questions, can just anyone leave commercial installations on the moon's surface?
- chihuahua 2y agoThey can, until someone else comes along and steals or destroys it.
- hugs 2y agoAny former Googlers here from long ago also mildly surprised this wasn't an announcement from google? Circa the "glory days" in 2007, "Google Moonbase" was the (90%? jokingly) go-to answer internally for the next crazy, ambitious project the company should work on. "Google Moonbase" was also the go-to answer when friends or family would ask what cool thing you're working on. Especially if you were working on actually secret projects like Chrome or Android at the time.
- lijok 2y agoArticle filled with opinions of speculators in no way attached to the project. They're putting satelites in orbit around the moon that contain storage for backups. They're going to make bank. Genius.
- aqueueaqueue 2y ago123rd falsehood developers believe about networks: the endpoint isn't moving around through space with 1.5s of latency. In practical terms though copying data to every aws region on earth would be cheaper. Or would it? :thinking face:
- condensedcrab 2y agoAlso need to note the need for radiation hardening for all electronics. Plus the ping to the moon would be miserable…
- jedberg 2y agoThe moon doesn't make a ton of sense, but Antarctica sure does. It's cold, it's dry, and if you load it up with GPUs, the latency is not a huge problem because you'd mostly be using it for training runs. And it's still on Earth, so you can connect it with an undersea cable. Biggest issue would be power. Not sure what the geothermal situation is there, but given that they get most of their power from diesel, it's probably not great. You could build a big solar array, but then you can only use it for 1/3 of the year.
- eru 2y agoThe moon would make more sense for solar. Btw, instead of Antarctica, you could put your data centre in Iceland (with more or less the same pros, but fewer cons). And: people are actually doing that!
- jedberg 2y agoIceland has a great geothermal power story, but the air is not nearly as cold. The reason Antarctica is good is because you would just blow outside air into the datacenter, no chillers required.
- eru 2y agoYes, Iceland is a bit warmer than Antarctica. But cooling is still relatively easy: Iceland only gets to about 14C in summer days. Round it up, and say it's definitely below 30C. If you run your computers at about 60C, that's still plenty of difference. You can also look into dumping your heat into water. Either ocean or freshwater.
- throwawaymaths 2y agoheat transfer is going to be a bitch. on the moon, there's no atmosphere, so no convection. as there is no erosion on the moon, regolith is very spiky and has very little contact between adjacent particles, so it's shit at conduction.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoVery similar challenges to my backburner project of putting a web server inside my body (currently on hold)
- Jean-Papoulos 2y ago>“We call it resilience as a service,” Stott says. “It’s like a whole new level of backup that we’ve never had before.” Yeah it's a gimmick. Founders will go on to do something else one VC money runs out and they've had fun with their salaries.
- Jotalea 2y agoI think the ping will be massive.
- vrighter 2y agoprotect sensitive data by putting it in a high radiation environment, at high risk of micrometeorites, and where getting rid of tons of generated heat is hilariously impractical. Got it