zlacker

>>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
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.

>>Daedal+721
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.