In an era when data is being treated as the new oil, but also as a new threat to the environment, scientists and tech giants are increasingly considering the option of moving it off Earth — literally
Point Nemo or Point Nemo is the most distant land that exists, it is located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and in every text about those few rocks of volcanic origin, it must be stated that the closest people to it are cosmonauts on a passing space station, a little more than 400 kilometers away, but up. Soon, similar data could be used for data centers. The nearest one could be equally distant to us, from above, even when we are in the most densely populated place in the world. Because there are plans to move our data from the "cloud" even further, to satellites.
There are many reasons for this, most of which are related to efficiency and ecology. The amount of data we process every millisecond is so great that maintaining such systems requires enormous energy. You are much needed energy is spent on processor cooling systems, so the carbon dioxide emissions of data centers have started to seriously bother. In a closer orbit, there would be no such problems. Cooling would be more natural, due to the low ambient temperature to which the systems would easily transfer heat, and the energy for work would be obtained from large solar panels. The only environmental sin would be the launch of satellites, which again can be solved, says the profession.
Plans for satellite data centers are varied. Some see them as a convenient place for all big data, but also for its processing, where some satellites would carry, figuratively speaking, hard disks while others would have processors that process the data. The advantage compared to the current situation is that the availability would be better, there would be no terrestrial interference, even wars and natural disasters would not disrupt the Internet, as evidenced by the example of Starlink.
Another type of use is the collection of data on phenomena on Earth and in space, their processing and sending to appropriate addresses. For example, a satellite spots a forest fire or a similar accident at an early stage, this information is processed and, with the addition of artificial intelligence, the appropriate services on Earth are activated. Maybe robotic, but precisely guided from space. Information sent by the lunar station or the one from Mars can also be collected and processed. There are many ideas and they are all very advanced.
There are, of course, problems. Mostly mundane. The first question that arises is who is responsible for what happens on computers in space. Is it the owner of the satellite, is a possible lawsuit filed in the country where it is registered or where the satellite was launched? Or do the courts as we know them have no authority over the work of the machines that orbit the planet?
Maintenance is also a problem, although somewhat smaller. Technical support would probably have to be organized in space, even a robotic one, whose job would be to occasionally restart something by brutally turning it on and off, which cannot be done remotely.
The third problem is latency, i.e. the time from the issuance of the command to its execution, which is measured in milliseconds and is greater if communicating with a satellite. This means that banking transactions certainly could not be carried out in this way, probably not many others that require minimal response time. For example, remote medical operations, which are considered the future of healthcare.
The first steps in moving data and processors into space have been made in a big way and they are not quite seven miles away, but they should be seven hundred. The reason is strong cosmic radiation, which is not good for the equipment, and therefore it must be specially protected. Therein lies the problem of upgrading the hardware. Space stations are powered by computers built at the time of their launch, so some still have 286s running fine. A serious data center requires constant upgrading, which is very difficult or impossible in the case of satellites. It remains for linguists to solve a serious problem - how to respond to an unsatisfied user whose connection is interrupted with "teams are on the ground".
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