Green Computing

There's a bit of talk nowadays about 'Green Computing' and what can be done to decrease the environmental impact of power hungry electronic devices. Actually, its another case of necessity being the mother of invention. If you look at the figures for the power output of modern silicon chips they are, per unit of surface area, more power hungry than the heating element of an electric fire! Datacenters groan under the weight of their cooling equipment and many now struggle to supply enough power to the racks. It's not that hardware vendors are environmental angels, its that the kit is about to burst into flames (literally in the case of some laptops!)

Perhaps we're just on the wrong place with regards to aggregating IT hardware. Maybe we should look to put as much together in one (or two or three for proper disaster recovery) place. I think the Moon is the best place to put it. Solar panels to generate electricity and just let the heat radiate way into space. The trick is to put as much kit in the same place as is possible and leave the minimum amount of information to be transferred between the Earth and the Moon. At the same time, people should have slightly more kit in their own homes, but it should be plumbed in properly so that in the winter the excess heat can contribute to heating the whole place. What we need is a global repository of soft objects, like digital photos, music and video which can be mega-cached locally and transferred via P2P processes around the globe and to and from the big MoonPuter.

Maybe I'm just going barking...