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There are isolated problems with current patches, but they are well-known and documented on this site. |
Saving earth’s data one byte at a time
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla., April 19, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Lonestar Data Holdings Inc. announced today that it is launching a series of data centers to the lunar surface and has contracted for its first two missions to the lunar surface and for the build of its first data services payload, the first data center to the Moon.
Or…the Lunatics attack it from above! 🙂
Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you recognize a mistake as soon as you make it again.
So far, the Lonestar idea seems to be limited to the “Tech” side of this “solution” to the problem of “how to avoid all the possible disasters, natural and unnatural, afflicting data security?” Of which security there is every other day news of some terrible breach exposing personal data of millions, stealing millions of dollars from crypto caches, etc. (according, for example, to what’s posted almost daily in AW’s “Code Red” forum.)
“Tech” aside, the Lonestar announcement says not nearly enough about how, when, or with what this will be made reality. For example, about getting the servers to the Moon and then keep them working there, with all that invaluable data being sent from Earth to be kept inside. Considering that the Moon’s daytime lasts weeks, when the servers will be in the blaze of the Sun, without an atmosphere to move the scalding heat of up to 246 F (101 C) away to the outer-space cold night side, where it gets as far down as -298 F (-183 C), in this bone-dry world without oceans to moderate temperatures down to a range where electronics are designed to work. Those servers will need to cope with the Moon’s temperature range. Spacecraft and landers cope with these unearthly conditions with special insulation and reflecting surfaces, plus internal heating and cooling devices. The servers will need that. So it is possible, in principle, that they’ll get it. But something like this needs to be designed, tested, redesigned, retested … For anything to be used in space, this can be quite hard to do and usually goes on for years before something is ready for its intended purpose. That is a basic space engineering fact.
Then, there is the money side of this: now days, the cost of launching something just to low Earth orbit is in the several tens of millions of dollars; for large and heavy items, in the hundreds of millions of, well, of any currency, so going to the Moon is more: that is the cost of the rocket, plus fuel, plus the wages of the technical personnel in charge of the whole thing, including maintaining radio contact with and control of the rocket and, eventually, its cargo. Then there is the part about landing something safely on another world: it’s tricky and expensive to implement. And maintaining radio contact, as it is not good to have super-protected data that no one can access. Without the protection of the terrestrial magnetic field and atmosphere that greatly reduce the deleterious effect of the bombardment with cosmic ray energetic particles on electronics and storage media on Earth.
So far, no spacecraft has made it to the moon and landed servers on it meant to work for a really long time without failures that wipe out or corrupt the data. So there is no precedent to use as a good starting point to making this kind of hardware and carrying out this kind of mission.
Plus the servers are supposed to be Nuclear Powered: that is a big no-no: launching payloads with radioactive content is seriously discouraged by international agreements. Because, what if the rocket blows up while still in the atmosphere and scatters all the radioactive fuel all over the world? Talk about Chernobyl! Talk about the huge and innumerable lawsuits! Talk of all the people that are sickened by it. Only allowed (in known spacecraft, secret military projects may exist that do more than this) are low-power mini-reactors where the slow radioactive decay of small quantities of something like radioactive thorium — with no highly energetic chain reaction, unlike in regular power station reactors. The mini-reactors are used in interplanetary probes and landers to supplement, when needed (i.e., when in eclipse or too far from the Sun), the batteries used to store power generated by their big solar panels.
So I really don’t now: I think I am feeling a bit skeptical about this whole thing.
Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).
MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV
wavy: “is there a small area of the moon that stays out of the sun all the time?”
Are you looking for a good place to put those Lunastar servers? Maybe you are a concerned Lunestar shareholder?
Yes, there are some around the north pole and, being always in darkness and without an insulating atmosphere to keep them warmer, they are nearly as cold as outer space:
50 Kelvin or -224.15 Celsius, or -369.67 Farenheit (Outer space is at some 3 Kelvin above absolute zero. And this is not quite zero, because of the heat coming from the planets, asteroids, etc. and from the stars, plus the heat left over from the Big Bang.)
But these cold places are in craters. This is an article (with nice crater pictures!) from a Webpage dedicated to divulging the findings made using NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC), courtesy of Arizona State University:
http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/posts/96
So as you are interested in some cool open spaces to go and put the servers there, you are out of luck. But this is not a complete disaster: there the Moon’s surface has been exposed to the Sun during the long lunar day and cools slowly during the equally long lunar night, but not entirely, so it gets cold, but not quite as cold, at a balmier -298 F, or -183 C .
However, I doubt servers can possibly work at such low temperatures unless they have some way of keeping warm inside their enclosure. The idea (bad idea, as I have mentioned earlier) is to use a nuclear reactor as the power source for generating electricity to make the servers work, so part of this electricity can be used to keep the equipment warm enough
So wavy: should you start trying to sell your Lonestar shares now, or should you wait?
Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).
MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV
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