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Comment by cwkoss | Hacker News Reader

In addition to lack of solar energy, I wonder if nuclear power source is necessary to keep batteries or other electronics warm enough to function properly.

Conversely, on Titan, we won't need to worry about heat sinks as everything is kept at ~94K in a bath of liquid and frozen methane. Perhaps in a few hundred years AWS's most popular region for intensive compute will be under Titan's methane sea. High spin up cost, but cheap super-conduction environment once you're up.

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Interestingly they actually exploit these cold temperatures to keep things cool. The Dragonfly Gamma-Ray and Neutron Spectrometer(DraGNS)'s gamma ray detector is mounted outside.[0] In most other probes the detector would need to kept cold with a cryocooler. [0]https://www.jhuapl.edu/techdigest/TD/td3403/34_03-Lorenz.pdf

Hah, I was always intrigued by the idea of placing solar cells on the bright side of Mercury and servers on the dark side. I wonder what other good options might exist in the solar system.

Mercury's whisper thin atmosphere won't be much use for cooling anything, though possibly the surface would be. However, the real problem is that Mercury isn't actually tidally locked anyway.

In certain regions on Mercury the temperature stays within 1 degree of room temperature less than a meter underground. http://einstein-schrodinger.com/Mercury_temperature.pdf It’s actually relatively habitable. http://einstein-schrodinger.com/mercury_colony.html

> In fact, if we delay until the distant future, or even 50 years or so, such an effort probably will become impossible. This is because us humans will consume the Earth's non-renewable energy and mineral resources almost completely within the next 50-100 years, severely reducing our discretionary income for costly activities such as space travel.

I wonder when that was written...

Makes me think of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.

Likely around 2013 by the Wayback Machine.

You could have the facility move constantly to keep the facility straddled across the sunlight line. At the equator, this would require constantly moving at about 7 mph, though you could reduce the speed necessary by moving to higher latitudes.

Yeah but if you break down...

Like in the scifi books?

Reminds me of the book Absolution Gap

Appears in 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson.

They move the whole city around the planet at 7mph!! 10/10 would recommend

Sounds like Absolution Gap and/or a less annoying version of the Mortal Engines movie (please tell me the book was better than this).

Also features in Charlie Stross, Saturn's Children.

Or another scifi novel, West of January by Dave Duncan.

To add to the vein of sci-fi novels using this idea: Inverted World by Christopher Priest. Well, similar concept but weirdified in the 1970’s fashion.

Also appears in Asimov's classic "I, Robot" collection, as a Powell and Donovan story called "Runaround"[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaround_(story)

Mercury doesn't keep the same side to the sun all the time. So you'd need to either bury everything deep enough (obviously not possible for solar cells), or keep them such that they're always on the terminator. The latter has been explored in Kim Stanley Robinson's work, 2312.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2312_(novel)

mercury-dark-1

The poles of the moon. Have 3 "legs", and the alternate being the hot and cold areas.

Yes, you need equipment that can swap being hot and cold, but it's a lot easier to get to :)

I find it kind of funny that you think AWS will still be around in a hundred years.

This paper company was founded 771 AD: https://www.shinise.ne.jp/j_kyoto/voices/vol/48/48-d.html

It's not even the longest-lived company in the world. This construction company was founded in 578 AD and continuously operated until 2006 when it was bought by a larger company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kong%C5%8D_Gumi

100 years ago was only 1919 -- here are some random companies from 1919 that I found on Wikipedia (ignoring for a moment that this is plainly surviorship bias):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champion_(sportswear)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KitchenAid

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrifty_PayLess

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesco

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proffitt%27s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bentley

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%26W_Restaurants

Companies surviving for 100 years isn't quite routine but it's certainly not so rare that its surprising when one does. I don't think it's at all inconceivable that Amazon could stay open for a hundred years. It's made it past the first 10 years, the turbulent start when most companies are culled. I'd wager that the biggest threat to Amazon surviving to 100 is being broken up a la Bell/Standard Oil.

Even after being broken up, AWS would still exist - it just wouldn’t be part of the amazon conglomerate

A company lasts just 11 years on average on the S&P 500 now. Companies are surviving for shorter time periods now then they used to.

Like with pre-modern human lifespans, there's a VERY long tail on that number.

First off, what is your source for that average? This report (https://www.innosight.com/insight/creative-destruction/) has a much higher average, and forecasts a fall to 12 years by 2027.

Second, that's average time in the S&P 500 index. As noted and n the report, there are many reasons besides going under that companies drop off the index. That number doesn't really say much about longevity of the company.

The Avedis Zildjian Company, now an American-based cymbal manufacturer, was founded in Constantinople in 1623. Hell, even Nintendo's 123.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avedis_Zildjian_Company

The oldest preserved share of any company is from 1288. It's since been merged, but it's still around.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stora_Enso#History_of_Stora

Heck, IBM is 100+ lol

For ones maybe more familiar to an American audience and/or to techies:

Bayer (1860s Germany), Johnson & Johnson (1886), 3M (1902), the Coca-Cola Company (1892), IBM (1911), HP (1939), Mitsubishi (1870), Wells Fargo (1852).

The italian bank Monte dei Paschi di Siena was founded in 1624, they even use some of the centuries old building as offices...it's not doing very well but it's still there

AWS is different from Amazon though. AWS is a cutting edge technology in a fast moving industry that is likely to be made obsolete in the next 20 to 30 years.

That's a good point - the "waste" heat from an RTG (which is only about 5% efficient) is very useful in those extreme cold temperatures.

NASA makes a smaller RTGs for heating tasks, they can scale smaller if they don’t need to generate electricity.

Super fast compute, but awful ping…

Perfect for mining bitcoin

Not really; if you find a block it will mostly likely have been beaten by someone else's block by the time yours reaches most nodes...unless there is a Saturn based side chain or similar.

It depends if the "most nodes" are on Mercury or on Earth.

This will sound crazy, and I'm not suggesting the consumer would deal with it directly, but I think we'll need coins for each planetary body and another one for the solar system that has a much longer block time. More scales would be useful, but these are the minimum. Repeat for each star, with MilkyWayCoin having an absurd block time.

To put it into perspective:

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/moons/saturn-moons/titan/overvi...

According to this (at the time of reading) a one way trip at the speed of light is ~75 minutes, so you will have approximately two and a half hours of ping.

Ouch.

Still, it raises an interesting question: how would a hypothetical Earth-Titan network protocol work?

Batch instead of stream I'd reckon.

Can't do much about the time it takes light to get here, so I guess the answer is we'd have to learn to love 75 minute ping :)

Alcubierre warp drive powered Sneakernet?

If you can't be with the one you ping, ping the one you're with.

That protocol exists, it is called Delay-Tolerant-Networking.

http://ipnsig.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Whats-new-in-IO...

The InterPlanetary File System is a thing, it just isn't interplanetary yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System

Might be suitable for quantum computing ... Re. thin atmosphere and low gravity, humans could probable be able to fly wearing wings. So if we put a base there it would not be boring.

Never thought about this before, in theory does this bring super conductors closer to reality?

Why do you think they launched a deep space reviving network at re:invent last year?

Well we don't want to disturb the environment too much

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