u/SoylentRox

Self replicating lunar factories are a logical outcome if we can solve 2 basic technical problems:

(1) General purpose machine intelligence at the same skill level as the average mining or manufacturing worker today. (Aka "blue collar AGI")

(2) There are element shortages on the Moon we will need to either solve by plasma centrifuges or imports.

But every solar panel is productive only half the time, and the only radiators that work in the daytime are enormous 10+ km towers you must pump coolant in a 20km loop.

Also tin, useful for droplet radiators, is 1pppm and rare on earth as well.

Also it's 5000 terrawatts of electric power once you cover the entire lunar surface with 40 percent efficient solar panels. I thought of this solution when I realized the moon radiates its own waste heat away just fine, you need a continuous surface of 1/2 the lunar surface area facing space.

Hence, terminator trains. You build a series of continuous tracks around the moon, starting at the poles. Use superconducting maglev of course. You suspend all your industry on continuous mega trains that go between pairs of rails a few hundred meters apart.

Since the gravity is 1/6, only about 5 percent of the mass of the factories is in the train structure, and it's all cheap plentiful materials like steel and aluminum.

The "front" of the train carries the solar panels on the lit side, and sends power via superconducting or high voltage cables to the rear. Factories just pump their coolant to their roofs where there's quartz tubes.

Additional trains carry the regolith and mined lunar rocks to the factories by synchronizing speeds before material transfer, but even the equator train is at 15 kph - mining trucks can literally drive next to the train and robots toss bins back and forth.

The reason we do this is you're paying about 10-20 percent of the mass of your factory in excess metal to get 100 percent more productivity from your equipment and to save thousands of kilometers of "coolant rivers" you would need if you want your equipment to be working in the lunar day.

At the end of the self replicating land rush (about 30-40 years from the beginning) the entire surface is covered with trains, and there are additional trains that run underneath the elevated ones with the solar panels and radiators.

Surprisingly I can't find prior art on this idea.

Theory :

AI progress isn't hype. Please assume that for the purpose of this discussion.
It is possible to develop ASICs that run LLMs hundreds of times faster, image reasoning LLMs (like the recently released gpt imagine 2) in realtime, and increase the compute available to robots by a factor of 1000 times. (Taalas demoed it's possible, Generalist demoed better models using more compute )
AI models write the silicon topology and layout compilers for these ASICs in (2), compressing the design process from months to weeks. (openAI employees claim image gpt-2 was 99 percent ai written)
The same AI models get hosted on (2) compressing the design process to hours

What I am describing is a form of intelligence explosion. What I see here is any silicon capacity - of any process - that can contribute to making more ICs that go into a data center, where AIs are doing the work equivalent of billions of people, or into a robot that is earning revenue, outbid everything else.

That if the fabrication cost today is $50 for a smartphone, $200 for a desktop GPU, as the above happens this skyrockets. It gets bid up to over $1000 and essentially entire industries that are not data centers or robots end up shutting down or degrading their offerings.

You would see cars stop having screens or degrade to much older silicon processes, phones degrade back to basically blackberries (still a display probably, old process SOC inside, good luck launching a web browser), etc.

And this lasts for years until the bottlenecks - ASML tools and mirrors from Zeiss - are scaled up to the point that there is enough capacity.

Am I missing anything? I know electric power is also a bottleneck, but you can downclock to essentially consume all power available.

Lunar Terminator trains: 100 percent better production!