I’ve been been trying to think through the implications of the current ‘net trend - life streaming…saving and publishing your life in digital format for everyone to see - and for all time. Compare this to old school life streaming - basically a collection of photo albums or, if you’re me, a big box full of photographs. Maybe you also have some VHS home movies, but let’s just think about the pictures for now.
Environmental cost of keeping a picture forever: one time “charge” for development paper and some nasty chemicals.
Environmental cost of keeping your picture in a digital lifestream on a web server: Electrity usage from now until eternity.
I did some quick research (very quick) so I’ve only found data from 2005 - pre social-networks. That data indicated the existence of something like 27 million servers world wide, operating at an annual nergy cost of $7.2 billion. That $ amount includes the energy required to run the cooling systems at major data centers. Now that number HAS to be higher. Google alone has something like 140,000 servers and I’ve read that Facebook has 10-15,000. And figure that each social network and web2.0 service has a data center with enourmous cooling capacity. You are looking at some serious energy demand.
I’m trying to come up with a watt per megabyte baseline number so we can estimate how much power it will take to keep your lifestream published. It’s tough because the storage capacity of these services is unknown. Obviously the more data they pack into a server than the lower the number will be. Or does it matter? If a disk has to spin to serve an image, does it matter how many servers there are? Probably, because there is a steady state power draw for each server - a baseline cost to just store your image.
Anyway - my gut tells me these are not small numbers. Life streaming is also exponential. So even as you add more photos and videos you are piling on to your existing lifestream - ever growing and never shrinking.
