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Comment by ajmurmann | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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)

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 :)

mercury-dark-1

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