Since Musk shifted his sights to the moon, everyone is talking about moon bases now. But this article is pretty good. A ton of resources if you want to get up to speed on how people are thinking about commercializing the moon.

It's not all about powerIt's not all about power

One might assume that since there is nothing in the way up there in space, solar power will be bountiful. So bountiful that we might even beam it back down to Earth. Not so:

Generating solar power in space to beam to Earth to compete with ground-based solar, gas combined cycle, etc, is “out of the money” by a factor of about 100 million.

However, using the power in space and beaming down a finished product does make sense.

Send microwaves to Earth-based receivers containing not raw power, but sufficiently valuable binary bits of information.

But what sort of bytes are valuable? At this point I was hoping the guy was gonna mention proof of work, but that is not where he goes:

the value of a byte containing an inference token from some AGI is much higher than the value of a byte containing some error correction on a P frame of your TicTok video.

So: we are gonna put data centers in spaceSo: we are gonna put data centers in space

The author notes that there is possibly a LOT more demand for chat answers than we have explored:

We’re unlikely to saturate our demand for intelligence and like Falcon and Starlink, Starship and orbital inference will print money.

But we need power to make all that money.

Starlink is currently about 200 MW. Starship can lift orbital power generation to about 100 GW with perhaps 10,000 launches per year, or about one per hour.

If we want more power in space, it sounds like moon mining is what people are looking in to. Except mining takes a lot of power.

And TIL I that the moon is actually not a sunny place. So:

The short version is: avoid excavation and construction as much as possible.

Instead this guy flips the script and suggests:

Not everyone agrees with me but I think the math is quite clear – beaming power from Earth-based power plants to the Moon is 1000x cheaper and much faster than the next cheapest option, and allows what cargo mass we do send up to be focused on production of ores, not operation of finicky and labor-intensive power plants.

Basically, the moon gets used for some small amount of mining but mostly he thinks the real work should be done on orbital space stations where it is always sunny.

This is not a topic I've paid much attention to, bit if you find yourself interested, the attached article is full of links and looks like a good place to start a tumble down a new rabbit hole.