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.
Add comment