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.
Is the moon too far for your data? IBM's Red Hat is teaming up with Axiom Space to send a data center into space
Submitted 1 month ago by Sunshine@lemmy.ca to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
semperverus@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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.
Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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.
huquad@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Except radiation is much much higher around the moon, resulting in greater corruption events
catloaf@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Anything that needs a lot of data. Same reason you’d download something to your PC instead of streaming it.
Also for local processing before upload. If you have a huge data set that compresses well, it’s much better to compress first, then upload to Earth.
tfowinder@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Craters at poles are in permanent shadows with -200 degrees permanently
shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
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.
joyjoy@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Sounds like some sort of decentralized federation of server resources. I don’t know, seems a bit advanced. /s
Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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.
Don’t ISPs already do something like this to save on bandwidth on their side? Just saving local copies of commonly accessed files.
At least I remember hearing about that a decade ago, I wonder if that can still happen now that there’s basically https everywhere.
UberKitten@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
Nothing would stop you from running a DNS server on Mars and handling requests locally.
shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
The problem isn’t the DNS requests. It’s the data synchronization that would have to occur if you were accessing a service hosted on Earth.
db2@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Well I guess that’s what it takes to make Microsoft’s ocean bottom data center look reasonable. 😬
Sunshine@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
I wonder what the moon’s top level domain name would be?
huquad@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Having worked on these systems, datacenters in space still don’t make any economical sense to me. Cost of shipping, additional power and thermal limitations/challenges, much greater radiation environment causing corruption and premature hardware failures, and little to no maintenance/upgrade opportunities. Zero sense
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 1 month ago
INB4 chumps discover that cooling hardware in a vacuum is, in fact, quite difficult.
Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Lol, this is the truth. There are many cool opportunities for industry in space, but I gotta be honest, I don’t think datacenters are one of them…
tfowinder@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
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)
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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.
SpikesOtherDog@ani.social 1 month ago
What if me make a heat laser? /s
Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 1 month ago
You joke, but actually that is a thing.
When research projects involve super-cooling a substance, after you’ve done as much as you can with convective cooling, researchers will sometimes use lasers to cancel out vibrations within the substance, and cancelling vibrations essentially equals cooling.