It takes 850 Google searches to make a newspaper and 15,000 Google searches for a cheeseburger. On Google’s blog, the company’s senior vice president of operations compares the energy expended for a typical Google search to many such actions to show that the energy consumption of Google searches pales in comparison.
That aside, an interesting article digs into the energy roots of the information economy to predict that the future could well be one without the Internet, or one with no more free access!
A Google search may still leave some energy for a few burgers and coffees but the bigger picture the author reveals is that of a guzzler. The two big server farms that keep Yahoo’s family of web services online use more electricity between them than all the televisions on Earth put together.
‘Multiply that out by the tens of thousands of server farms that keep today’s online economy going, and the hundreds of other energy-intensive activities that go into the internet, and it may start to become clear how much energy goes into putting these words onto the screen where you’re reading them.’
With the age of cheap abundant energy having come to a quick, abrupt end, he predicts that the economics of the internet could take a very different shape. One in which very few will have access and even that comes at a big price.
Come to think of it, that is a very scary prospect. The information supply and storage we have taken for granted could be taking its last few breaths.
The author brings in a eerie comparison to E M Forster’s novella The Machine Stops, which talks of a cyberculture dependent on the machine for its lives. When the machine stops, so do their lives.
In our world, when the energy stops feeding into the machine, it grinds to a halt. And if the Internet is no more, what happens next?? Can libraries step in to fill the vacuum? Do you think this is a fictitious scenario? What would your world be without the Net? Send in your reply.
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