Great discussion. I think the energy use of the net & computers will be a bit easier to tackle via technological progress than real world transport will be.
In an era that is as much about resources peaking as it is climate change, we are going to have to get used to monitoring our consumption of pretty much everything, except breathing (for now). The freedom to pay no attention to how much we consume is not a sustainable freedom, I dread to think how much froth will be generated over the next 20 years by humans coming to terms with these emerging realities, but I think in the longrun its healthy. And the internet should not be excluded from the new mindset. Net may well be placed under strain by energy cost or security of supply issues, especially if its shouldering new traffic that replaces physical traffic (ie more digital downloads and video conferencing). It may need a redesign if energy supply reliability woes causes outages. Peer2peer, mesh networks and suchlike may e part of the future, hard to be sure. We could even end up in a situation where some things arent 24/7, eg your media that you subscribe to is downloaded overnight, offpeak, when there is not so much electricity needed for other things. Im not saying thats likely, just that almost anything could happen if circumstances dictate in future. What is hard to take is just how unfairly these new energy realities may be dealt with. Eg by price. If the cars days are numbered, a lot of that will happen due to people being priced off the road. And whilst most people have to pay for the net already, and there are different speeds depending on what you can afford, its not nice to think of a future where even more people may be denied 'the full internet' for reasons of cost. On the otherhand if the net is deemed as essential as banks to keep the world turning, it could get bailed out and turned into a more government/social infrastructure thing, that citizens have a right to regardless of their ability to pay. Talking specifics, in some ways a faster connection, getting the download completed quicker, could use less energy. High definition not only places a greater load on servers, but also during playback and encoding. Flash player uses quite a lot of cpu when playing video, its not the most efficient way to watch. However if you are watching video on a laptop rather than a large lcd or plasma tv, you are using less energy. And there will obviously be improvements along the way, such as encoding and decoding being handled more by low-energy dedicated chips or on the gpu which can do certain things more efficiently than the cpu. But its still quite early on in the story of our changing relationship with energy and consumption. If we were at the peak of the crisis I would probably get no choice about how I curtailed my consumption, it will be forced upon me. Its a luxury to debate it and to make personal choices about being more sustainable, its still a choice, one which I wont quite take to the extreme by going back to text, photography and audio rather than video. It seems hard to think of video as a luxury right now, but never say never I guess. Cheers Steve Elbows --- In [email protected], "Jay dedman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 8:58 AM, Rupert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > This is the only point I was going to make. You're all doing a fine > > job of debating the other politics. But make no mistake: your videos > > are melting the ice caps. A McKinsey study this year estimated that > > data centers will be bigger polluters than airlines by 2020. > > like anything we do these days, people got to get smart: > http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081110-servers-to-finally-gain-energy-star-rating-in-february-2009.html > > But not just people....Businesses. > > jay > > -- > http://jaydedman.com > 917 371 6790 >
