Keeping to its tradition of coming up with (alleged) new updates on April 1st, Google Cloud Platform has published a blog post today that it is expanding to Mars to meet the customer needs – no matter where they are.
In its post, the company has said, “in addition to supporting some of the most demanding disaster recovery and data sovereignty needs of our Earth-based customers, we’re looking to the future cloud infrastructure needed for the exploration and ultimate colonization of the Red Planet.”
The company also starts describing about how expanding to Mars has always been a top priority and by opening a dedicated extraterrestrial cloud region, they’re bringing the power of Google’s compute, network, and storage to the rest of the solar system, unlocking a plethora of possibilities for astronomy research, exploration of Martian natural resources and interplanetary life sciences.
The have nicknamed their first interplanetary data center as “Ziggy Stardust” and will open in 2018. It has also stated that the project which was originally started with Google Planets team, has found a suitable location for the data centre in Gale Crater.
For the unassuming reader, things might look legit until now. But this is where things started to get really interesting and the author unleashed his full creativity to expose the April fool prank. The blog states “in order to ease the transition for our Earthling customers, Google Cloud Storage (GCS) is launching a new Earth-Mars Multi-Regional location. Users can store planet-redundant data across Earth and Mars, which means even if Earth experiences another asteroid strike like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, your cat videos, selfies and other data will still be safe. Of course, we’ll also store all public domain scientific data, history and arts free of charge so that the next global catastrophe doesn’t send humanity back into the dark ages.”
The blog also includes one of the (false) testimonials from an early access user which again talks about colonizing mars before someone else does. “This will be a game changer for us. With GCS, we can store all the data collected from our rovers right on Mars and run big data analytics to query exabyte-scale datasets all in a matter of seconds. Our dream of colonizing Mars by 2020 can now become a reality” mentions the testimonial.
This is not the first time that Google pranked its users about exploiting Mars. Back in 2008, Google announced a joint project with the Virgin Group to establish a permanent human settlement on Mars. This operation has been named Project Virgle. The announcement includes videos of Richard Branson (founder of Virgin Group) as well as Larry Page and Sergey Brin (the founders of Google) on YouTube, talking about Virgle.
After the user submitted the application, the site notifies the user that the user is not fit for space, or that the user’s application is fine and “all you have to do is submit your video” [as a response to their video on YouTube]. As a result, an open source Virgle group has been established, OpenVirgle.
Even in 2014, Google announced a news related to interplanetary adsenses on planets and moons. In its statement, “With our recent discovery of the interplanetary IP address repository, you’ll have access to even more reports that can help you improve user engagement on your site. For example, if you notice a lot of traffic coming from Mars, try adding more pages in Martian to engage with those audiences.”
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