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What about on the Moon? My understanding is that heat is the killer. There you could sink pipes into the surface and use that as a heat sink. There are “peaks o
by api 10mo ago
What about on the Moon? My understanding is that heat is the killer. There you could sink pipes into the surface and use that as a heat sink. There are “peaks of eternal light” near the poles where you could get 24/7 solar power.
Latency becomes high but you send large batches of work.
Probably not at all economical compared to anywhere on Earth but the physics work better than orbit where you need giant heat sinks.
- morcus 10mo agoThe Moon doesn't have a magnetic field, though, so the second half of the article discussing difficulties due to radiation would still apply, right?
- api 10mo agoNot if you bury it in regolith. That’s an idea for a Lunar base too. The design is called “Hobbit holes.” Bury the occupied structures in piles of basically any local mass you can bury them in. It’s another huge problem for orbit though. Shielding would add a ton of mass and destroy the economics.
- nradov 10mo agoLunar regolith is so abrasive that digging holes or tunnels isn't going to be cost effective. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20250000687 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20250000687
- adamwong246 10mo agoWe will need to develop very robust, space-worthy electronics eventually. We can't rely on natural magnetic fields forever.
- fsh 10mo agoWe have been relying on natural magnetic fields for over a billion years, so we can probably continue doing so for a while.
- adastra22 10mo agoWe have robust, space-worthy electronics. They're discussed in the article. You just can't get SOTA performance from them, because of fundamental physics-driven compromises.
- shagie 10mo agoWe have them. The RAD750 for example (on the JWST and Curiosity rovers https://www.theregister.com/2012/08/08/mars_probe_cpu/ https://www.theregister.com/2012/08/08/mars_probe_cpu/ ) costs about $350k, has the architecture of a PowerPC 750 (the blue and white PowerMac G3), and runs at up to 200 MHz.
- hackeraccount 10mo agoI had this same thought and mentioned it on an ArsTechnica forum. There was reply that suggested that lunar regolith wouldn't be a good heat sink and a bit of googling makes me think this is probably true. That said anything has to be better then almost literally nothing so I'm still holding out for datacenters on the moon.
- marcosdumay 10mo agoYou'd have most of the problems of building in space, an abrasive quasi-atmosphere of dust, half a month of darkness every month, and not as good of a heat sink as the Earth's atmosphere.
- perihelions 10mo agoIt's not a viable heat sink because it's a thermal insulator that doesn't support transport of heat. The thermal conductivity of lunar regolith is lower than rock-wool insulation, 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" (2022)) https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/thermal-conductivity-d_429.html https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/thermal-conductivity-d_42... (Imagine, for entertainment purposes, what would happen if you wrapped a running server rack in a giant ball of rock-wool insulation, 50 meters in radius). Only way to dissipate large amounts of heat on the moon is with sky-facing radiators.