3xE: Energy, Economy, Environment. A space perspective case: Big Data Farms in Space

Energy is rapidly achieving a primary position as a factor of sustainability. An increasing demand for energy supply already characterized industrial society, and it was satisfied by traditional fossil sources, which were the most convenient when environmental requirements were limited to polluting agents, with unevenly distributed levels of restriction. The fast-growing economy of China and later India mostly relied on coal to increase electrical production. During the last decades, general concerns about climate change have started the so-called "energy transition", pushing the phase-out of all greenhouse gas (not to be confused with pollutants!) emitting technologies. More recently, the development of the electronic society - based on the global communication infrastructure - brought a very large spread of new technologies, such as electronic money, mass video communication, electric mobility, and now artificial intelligence, supported by supercomputers, big servers, and big data farms. All of these technologies require a very huge energy supply and bigger storage capabilities. Such a development is seriously questioning the green transition strategies, conceived by most governments to contrast climate change. The global energy demand - supposed to be decreasing by the above policies - is instead rising, very much more than expected. Renewable sources are growing, but fossil sources are growing too, and the two of them, together, cannot pair with the quickly increasing demand. In fact, overall GHG (Green-House-Gases) emissions are increasing despite all the declared efforts to reduce them. The energy market is also heavily impacted by the geopolitical situation, which is playing an uneven role in different areas of the world, especially for the natural gas market, whereas natural gas is the fossil fuel with the lowest GHG impact, and gas-fired plants can be built very quickly. Innovative solutions are dramatically needed, or the energy bill will necessarily grow uncontrolled, with critical social impacts, in a gloomy scenario where the benefits of the electronic society and freedom of mobility will be progressively restricted to privileged classes. It must be noted that after years of stagnation due to opposition by some environmentalist groups and wrong choices about the size and typology of the plants, nuclear fission energy is now recognized as a non-GHG emitting technology and it is fastly moving towards innovative solutions like small modular reactors (SMR) to reduce costs and the so-called fourth generation of fast reactors to solve once for all the "nuclear waste" problem, allowing as well a substantial reduction of the need of new mining for uranium. In the energy sector, Civilian Space Development can propose a wide range of solutions. As a short-term enterprise, new big data farms could be shifted from Earth into orbit, in the Cislunar region and on the Moon. This would reduce their environmental impact avoiding producing and dissipating huge amounts of energy on Earth. From a mid-term perspective, important industrial settlements might be installed at Earth-Moon Lagrange Points. All of these settlements will benefit from solar power directly collected in space, 365/365 days, 24/24 hours, without seasonal limitations and without the energy absorption of the atmosphere. Moon facilities can use small nuclear reactors to keep the energy flowing during the 14 Earth days of the lunar night, keeping the advantage of removing the impact of these facilities on the earthly environment. This paper explores the case for big data farms in Earth Orbit, on the Moon, and the Cislunar region.