Lonestar plans to put datacenters in the Moon's lava tubes Imagine a future where racks of computer servers hum quietly in darkness below the surface of the Moon. Here is where some of the most important data is stored, to be left untouched for as long as can be. The idea sounds like something from science-fiction, but one startup that recently emerged from stealth is trying to turn …
It's not for us it's for "others". In the distant future when they fly past and wonder who destroyed the third planet, the datacentres on the Moon will give them the answer. It will also mean that they can thank their deity (or equivalent thing they thank at those sort of times) that they didn't get here sooner when the inhabitants were still alive.
That assumes they would bother to look at the Moon beyond "hey there are a few landers here, they made it here in person" and go poking about inside lava tubes. Even if they do, how are they going to figure out how to access the data?
If we found an alien computer in a lava tube on the Moon from a Silurian civilization that was wiped out 65 million years ago, there's no way we'd be able to access any of the data in any understandable way. What we learned about them would be limited to the construction of the computer itself, not its contents.
Herding cats is easy. Vibrate your tongue to make a fast ticking sound (like a rattlesnake with a fast rattle) and you can herd them wherever you want. I have three of them and when I want to move them, TLTLTLTLTLTLT! and off they go.
Nah... Much easier than that...
Take one bag of Dreamies cat treats and shake...
The poster accepts no liabilities for damage caused to or repair costs for holes in plasterboard or other walls.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nel8S0sbkVY
"there's no way we'd be able to access any of the data in any understandable way... "
That depends on how it's stored. there's
a) physical storage - is it magnetic, optical, some fancy spin-property?? Since the physical laws of the universe are (we assume) universal, then there is a limited number of options for physically storing data at scale, many of which we are familiar with. So accessing the raw physical 'bits' should be possible.
b) encryption - most probably if something is encrypted, and we don't know enough about the underlying data to know what it should/could look like, there's no way we could decrypt it. If data just happens to be found, could be encrypted, but then again, anything left long-term on purpose for someone else to discover would not
c) coding - This brings us to rosetta-stone like basics. We have successfully deciphered many ancient languages without knowing what any of the symbols meant. The key is in knowing a bit about what are the underlying ideas that could have been written about. Turns out many human societies, although developing independently, developed in a remarkably similar way. If we can relate to the general ideas that the theoretical aliens might have stored data about, there is a possibility that with lots of patience and huge amounts of computing power we could decipher something. If we just can't relate to the ideas behind the data, it's not possible.
I'd like to see aliens decode H.264 without a manual. But that's by the by.
The objective here, apparently, is *not* to act as a library of human knowledge in the event of the human race being wiped out. If it were, the main goals would be making a storage medium capable of retaining data over millions of years, and the retrieval manual to go with it. Such a rugged data storage system could just be preloaded with data and launched as-is, with an update sent after it every couple of years.
However, it seems what they're *actually* trying to do is to sell Disaster Recovery as a Service, with a measly 16 terabytes of storage. Here: take this LTO-8 tape.
If all the data centres on the world are destroyed by nukes, having a backup copy of your data on the moon isn't going to help you much. And if there were a data centre on the moon where you could spin up your DR applications, your users would have to cope with a 1.5 second round-trip delay.
And if there is a significant Coronal Mass Ejection which destroys electronics on Earth, I somehow doubt that electronics on the Moon will survive as, in astronomical terms, it is really close, and has even less protection provided by the Earth's magnetosphere.
Returning back to Earth for a minute, take, for example, Cuneiform.
Last I heard, only around 2 or 3% of all the tablets ever found have actually been read/translated (half a million, give or take, are in museums, with more being found daily). I started learning cuneiform in it's various guises when I was young and deluded, thinking one could actually make a living contributing to knowledge of the past ... and it seemed more interesting than the mundane Latin and Greek, or even Aramaic. Perhaps I'll take it up again if I ever retire. There has GOT to be something of interest in all those unread tablets besides "<this year> billy-bob had 15 she-goats with kids, harvested 22 bushels of wheat and made 75 gallons of wine and 40 pounds of cheese" and the like ... wouldn't it be cool to be the first to read it after 5,000 years or so?
Data meant to be accessed by some unknown people (or other beings) in the future surely should not be encrypted, and It should be encoded in as straightforward way as possible.
As for explaining coding etc, I think such really-long-term storage must be accompanied by material that bootstraps the deciphering from the basics. Like explaining binary coding at elementary level (01 = o, 10 = oo, 11 = ooo), then ASCII A = 0100 0001 B = 0100 0010 ...
Of course there is the risk whoever finds your carefully prepared optical disks will use them for jewellery... But less likely if they are on the Moon, because stone-age level people will not get there.
"If we found an alien computer in a lava tube on the Moon from a Silurian civilization that was wiped out 65 million years ago, there's no way we'd be able to access any of the data in any understandable way."
Mankind would dedicate its best linguists, programmers and unlimited resources hoping to find new fusion and anti-gravity technology. Once unlocked, they'll be surprised to find a cache of Silurian pr0n.
If we found an alien computer in a lava tube on the Moon from a Silurian civilization that was wiped out 65 million years ago, there's no way we'd be able to access any of the data in any understandable way.
That's more or less what happens in "Schweigende Stern" (English: "The First Spaceship on Venus"), the only decent sci-fi film made behind the iron curtain. Humans do finally access the data, but it does not go well.
If a physical catastrophe wipes out backups at multiple datacanters 1000 km apart, chances are we 1) will no longer have the high-end comms technology needed for the restores (or the damned keys to unencrypt them) and 2) will have much more basic problems like finding clean water, food and shelter ...
Additionally some catastrophes like solar storms are much more hazardous in space.
And if it was a kind of super-ransomware that infects backups in multiple DCs, it will probably also hit the moon storage.
I can't see a scenario where moon backups offer sifnificant advantage over traditional ones.
-- I can't see a scenario where moon backups offer sifnificant advantage over traditional ones. --
Sorry you're missing the point which is to get loads of funding pay the founders loads of money and then fail to do anything.
The amount of storage isn't that much. If you're storing the keys in various locations in order to prevent losing them, you could keep a copy of a backup tape with them.
There's no need to do this on the moon.
Don't pay the wrong evil mastermind. I replaced your servers with rockets. HAHAHAH! Pay me 3,200,000,000,000,000 dollars or I de-orbit the moon.
Yeah, I know. This cost a lot more than I anticipated. It was outsourced and... Look, the loan sharks (with lasers) are going to grab me the moment I put this doomsday remote control down if I don't pay them back.
"One side of our bigger natural satellite is tidally locked and constantly faces Earth, meaning it would be possible to set up a constant, direct line-of-sight communication between devices on the Moon and our planet."
I think you'll find both sides are tidally locked!
> since the Earth rotates, that direct line-of-sight communication is actually rather inconstant, at maximum 12 h day-1.
You put 2, 3, or more earth stations and switch your connection as the world turns.
We already have such a thing for all the other chatty rovers we have sent away.
The overwhelming proportion of stored data that is merely ephemeral rubbish like business data, financial data, entertainment, health data & personal data dwarfs truly valuable data like engineering and scientific data (which can also be ephemeral). After a disaster of such a proportion that all Earthly copies are gone, the only data that might have value is the engineering and scientific data. Which of course, others have raised the question of getting it off the moon if the Earth has lost the means to retrieve it.
Basically, this looks to be a scam.
“I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them.”
These days when you read quotes like that from Heinlein's book, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, it sounds just like our politicians at a party. Did Heinlein predict the future, or did he create it?
Hmmm, he's not realised yet that anywhere you can send our data to on a rocket can also have other more explodey things sent to on rockets, so it's not exactly as "safe" as he thinks. Also, the moon has no atmosphere, so can be easily hit by passing space rocks. I believe there's some evidence on the surface that this may have happened quite a lot.
Finally, if the doomsday scenario happens and most knowledge is erased from the surface of the Earth, how the hell are the handful of survivors going to build the technology to communicate with your lunar broadband system?
"the moon has no atmosphere, so can be easily hit by passing space rocks. I believe there's some evidence on the surface that this may have happened quite a lot."
There is a video (or several) of an impact on the Moon during a total solar eclipse:
https://astronomy.com/news/2019/01/impact-on-the-moon-during-the-total-lunar-eclipse
An atmosphere is no guarantee of safety from space rocks. Ask the dinosaurs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_impact_craters_on_Earth
Forget *how* we are going to build the technology to read our data from the lunar backups... WHY on earth (if you'll pardon the pun) would we want access to that lunar data?!
Presumably, it'd be large organisations like governments or banks that can afford to send their "precious" data to the moon. The thing is - and hear me out on this - if we need access to lunar backups because our earthly data centres have had data integrity failures caused by their total destruction, we really DON'T need access to the lunar backups.
Things like food and shelter will be slightly further up the priority list for the few thousand survivors of such a catastrophe.
This was my thought. Commercial/enterprise data is of no value - if they need to fall back to the lunar storage, then the organisation probably doesn’t exist anymore.
As an ark for general data (Medicine, engineering, etc) then theoretically yes (but why not a salt mine on earth?). The question is how you get data back post-event. Lone star won’t exist as such. Access would need to be open and independent.
They could sell terminals akin to Starlink’s antennae - private individuals (preppers), municipal civil contingency organisations, governments, etc would procure the antennae in a shielded storage case. If the lunar DC loses contact with Earth for (say) 15days the DC switches from “infrastructure mode” to “arbitrary client mode”. Survivors around the world could then access the data with a terminal and laptop.
Question is, who is going to pay for that sort of data storage? Any government punting money into it would be saying “yes, we think there’s a chance one of our nuclear-armed neighbours is going to do the unthinkable”.
The really silly thing is that if you're going to store an antenna in a safe place, it would be just as easy to store a laptop with several terabytes of storage. Admittedly, it won't store as much as a data centre, but it can store an awful lot of useful information. And is much more practical and financially viable.
A better endeavour I think would be for some service to go through the total content of the internet and rank it's information by it's importance to humanity (e.g. a 1 TB download gets you the absolute most important stuff, a 5 TB download gets the most important, then the pretty important stuff etc). With a service like that available, you'd have preppers all over the world putting together little caches of the most critical information on the internet
This has to be the most ridiculous moon proposal since Jules Verne's cannon to shoot people there.
Beyond the practical dealbreakers, let's look at the economics. How much is it going to cost? How will it be priced? And who's going to sign up?
There are cold storage facilities in salt mines on Earth that can theoretically survive extinction events. There are warm storage facilities on Earth that provide remote backups. How is he going to be price competitive?
Next he'll declare the Man in the Moon is an investor.
"De la terre à la lune" was written in 1865. The first demonstration of a centrifuge was in 1875. The first centrifuge big enough to spin a human was built in 1933. Despite that, animals died from acceleration in the rockets built to test the viability of human space flight around 1959.
This is way more ridiculous than getting humans to the moon via cannon would have sounded in 1865. A better comparison might be trying to do an orbital launch with a battery powered steam rocket in 2021.
Verne did think about the acceleration and its "bullet" had a mechanism IIRC based on a water tank below the floor and small holes to let the water through to dampen the force. Of course he wasn't a physics, didn't calculate the acceleration, and couldn't know what human beings (and a dog) could stand.
Verne Sci-Fi is far better than most of the actual one based on some variations of the vampire alien, written by people who maybe understand the Fi - but never the Sci.
"This is way more ridiculous than getting humans to the moon via cannon would have sounded in 1865. A better comparison might be trying to do an orbital launch with a battery powered steam rocket in 2021."
As a kid, I used to jam a bicycle tyre valve into the nozzle of a Fairy Liquid bottle, about a 1/3rd full of water then pump up the pressure until it overcame the friction of the jammed in valve and launched into space[1]. The harder I jammed the valve in, the higher it launched (until I jammed it in too hard and the "pressure vessel" ruptured before launch!). Clearly this is a far better and greener launch system since it involves re-use and recycling. It just needs to be scaled up a bit. What could go wrong?
[1]. Space starts where I say it does. In this case, just above the roof line of my childhood home.
This has to be the most ridiculous moon proposal since Jules Verne's cannon to shoot people there.
Or spinlaunch.
Didn't we send our most precious data out in some satellite? Chuck Berry, and all that good stuff, and Vitruvian Man? Wasn't there a gold record with our most important data? I mean, 38 to 52 minutes @33rmp is enough for all our important data?
Just curious, would all the countries put there important data there?? Oh, right, let's define important, as a committee!
Nice one, take people's money while the POC dies on the vine. Can I get a job there?!!
All our radio stuff is permanently archived in a shell surrounding the transmitter, receding at the speed of light. All you have to do is place yourself at the right distance, point a receiver at where the Earth was, and you can listen to Marconi.
For rather sensitive values of receiver, of course.
"(actually how about real iron core storage? Or stone tablets)"
Funnily enough, that's what I came here to ask when they said "immutable data". I'm not sure spinny disks will survive the launch or landing and SSDs don't really have the lifespan I think they envisage. Although now I'm asking the question, paper tape might well last quite a long time in the cool, airless lava tubes, deep enough to be shielded from radiation. But, as someone mentioned earlier, there's some evidence of meteor impact that might be disadvantageous to long term "immutable" storage of any kind.
Something long term archive storage, like the M Disc (1000 years!!) might be better.
https://www.amazon.com/M-DISC-Blu-ray-Inkjet-Permanent-Archival/dp/B00K0S7GCW?th=1
Send the data, get it written and stored in a stacker or something, and when needed, have it retrieved into a reader and beamed back.
And in 1000 years time, we may already be extinct, so any warranty claims will not happen.
There are others on this site of my antiquity. I (and probably they) remember when companies were run with a mainframe and very little computer storage. The storage was generally in the form of paper or microfilm / fiche and was there because the taxman insisted you kept 7 years of financial records. There may have been a library of packaging used over the years and a technical library or two. These days companies can not exist without terabytes of data - hmmm.
I was surprised how little was said about the type / quality of data that might be stored on the moon - just the one thread about cat videos. I just wonder how much of the petabytes that are currently stored would have an genuine impact if it suddenly vanished. My latest order from Amazon might never arrive, the taxman may have to send me a form to fill in not to much else though. APART from not being able to read ElReg :(
There are no guarantees. Another Sun could run into ours and we'd all be gone, planets and all. However, distributed backups is only sensible and you never keep all your data in one basket, to mix a couple of metaphors.
What I would like to know is how they are planning on getting rid of the heat produced by their server farms. Getting rid of heat in a vacuum is a complete b*****d and even having solid earth (moonth?) does not guarantee a way of getting rid of it. Power is easy enough with solar cells and 2 weeks worth of batteries.
The whole think just reeks of Golgafrincham and the arks! An excuse to flog a bloody stupid, waste of money to a load of PHBs in companies looking to score points off other PHBs. "yeah, we have our offsite backups on the moon!".
FFS! I despair for humanity some days. How the feck do we get the data back from million miles away if we've lost all our tech and docs on planet earth? We gonna print out all the code and blueprints in hard copy and store them so someone can run rebuild the restore systems? The old maxim, "It's not a backup until you've restored it!".
Monkeys in suits, that's all we are. No wonder aliens are giving us a wide berth, they know humanity is a lost cause when they see that we consider this to be height of technological advance.
About 30 years ago, my daughter subtitled my CRC handbook "Post Apocalypse Science Rebuild Notes" and insisted on shelving it next to the Foxfire books, Machinery's Handbook, the UBC, and various other bits & bobs ... Hopefully my family is not alone in this. Shirley most of what we've learned will survive on paper ... rebuilding might be a pain, but we won't need to reinvent the wheel.
> The whole think just reeks of Golgafrincham and the arks!
You know an idea is *truly* stupid when even Dilbert hasn't considered it!
Here's the closest I could find: https://dilbert.com/strip/2013-02-23
Obviously it's inconceivable that we could investigate how we could co-operate as a species to stop "setting off bombs and burning things" and thereby protect the precious data that we are churning out at an alarming rate....
Far better to just plan F-up the Moon as well to store all the selfies, cat n food pics n pron - presumably there will be some sort of policy that prevents access to those who might set off bombs and burn things up there?
Now if I were writing this as a work of fiction, I'd have lots of big executive bonuses, followed by another round of funding, more huge executive bonuses, and then - oh dear, the costs are way more expensive than we figured, time to go bankrupt, followed by executives disappearing to tropical regimes that have no extradition treaties...
I'm not suggesting for one second that that's what's happening here, of course, but after the whole Theranos thing I just can't help seeing grandiose expensive business plans like this without trying to work out an angle like that. Maybe I've been watching too much Better Call Saul...
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter sends data to Earth for 10 or 11 hours each day when it's not occluded by Mars. The data rate is between 0.5 and 4 megabits per second. The total data it has sent so far is about 50 terra bits which is more that all of NASA's other planetary missions combined. If you do choose to back up your data on Mars be very selective about what you store as it's going to take a very very long time to restore. Also bear in mind that the radio dishes used for the Deep Space Network are very few and far more fragile than most places people might choose to securely store data.
There was a 1961 short story by Hal Draper entitled 'MS Fnd in a Lbry'. It showed how increasing volumes of data would require increasing degrees of compression and larger storage, ending in a galaxy-sized file store. Eventually the access keys were lost and so was the civilisation. Could come a lot sooner, it seems to me.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Fnd_in_a_Lbry
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