this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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Futurology
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I wonder if we'll see significant settlement of the arctic for the first time, as the century continues. They have reasonable solar potential 6 months of the year, water is easy to come by, and it's obviously plenty cool for things like data centers and adapting to climate change. I can imagine something like the Mongolian bitcoin mines, but in a newly founded community centering around it on an ice cap, and surrounded by a giant solar farm. Maybe they'd ship equipment between hemispheres according to season.
The problem would be the other six months of the year. Most data centers need to be running consistently to make a decent return on investment, and there isn’t much cooling benefit over the coast of any other lake or ocean.
Yeah, that would be the trick, I guess. I assume there's some use of electricity that would make financial sense here. Crypto mining is hopefully going the way of the dinosaurs, but there's other forms of number crunching, as well as manufacturing. If any equipment is light and valuable enough to relocate in the off-season, it'll be chips.
After 2045 Antarctica proper might be an option to pick up the slack; until then you'd be stuck with the subantarctic area or you'd have to compete with year-round centers, which is dicier. The obvious biggest benefit is that the land is pretty much free; you can have as much energy as you can have panels, and there's an initial pool of many thousands of people that would settle just for the adventure.
What's the solution for generation of electricity for the other 50% of the year though?
Well just get an extension cable from the Antarctic
I unironically think this is inevitable eventually, barring apocalypse. Not for a long time though, since there's many many shorter hops that make more economic sense.
This is Lemmy, so I'm almost legally required to say nuclear. But:
It's not a theoretical problem; our northern native people have a carveout in environmental regulations for exactly the reason they can't just put out a panel in the polar night, even if that would be a lot more convenient than diesel for a tiny community mostly cut off from the world. I wonder if e-gas would be the next best solution. Our future settlers could even make it or hydrogen during the on season, sell it, and then burn what's left for the smaller wintering population during the off season.
I wonder if pumped air would work well in an ice cave? It's already a very cheap way to store energy, and it doesn't really have a shelf life if done right.