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>>ajyoon+(OP)
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.

>>bs7280+3R
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.

>>vel0ci+lS
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.

>>bs7280+3T
Human organs manage to grow pretty well in 1G. In fact, they're almost certainly going to be terrible at it in zero g.