by Jeff Strabone
What kind of space is cyberspace? Of all the things we take for granted, cyberspace is near the top of the list. The promise of the internet in the twenty-first century is to make everything always available to everyone everywhere. All of human culture and achievement, the great and the not so great, may, one day soon, be a click away.
When one is online, cyberspace can seem a lot like outer space or, to use the latest jargon, ‘the cloud’. It appears infinite and ethereal. The information is simply out there. If, instead, we thought more about the real-world energy and the real estate that the internet uses, we would start to realize that things are not so simple. Cyberspace is in fact physical space. And the longer it takes us to change our concept of the internet—to see quite clearly its physical there-ness—the closer we’ll get to blogging our way to oblivion.
When I was in college in the 1990s, I resided near the campus computing center for two years and made friends with some of the staff. Seeing the physical space where everything happened did not make me want to be a computer science major, but it did de-mystify the internet. I knew they had machines that stored everything we did online. For all I know, they still have all our old e-mail stored away somewhere in case anyone ever runs for high office.
But permanent storage is not the same thing as what we have today. Now, everything that we upload—all the Facebook photos, all the Youtube videos—is always available on demand to everyone. What does it take to keep up that commitment? Tom Vanderbilt recently asked that question in the New York Times Magazine for June 14, 2009. It takes many huge buildings, with square footage in the hundreds of thousands of feet, called data centers or, more appropriately given the internet’s relentless growth, server farms.
In order to maintain total, ubiquitous availability, as today’s internet users have come to expect, a lot of things have to be happening simultaneously. The millions of hard disc drives that store the internet’s contents have to be powered up and spinning at thousands of revolutions per minute, not just in one place but at backup mirror sites elsewhere. The drives’ read-write arms are constantly racing over the surfaces of the discs. Other servers have to be available to handle spikes in demand, as when everyone searches for Michael Jackson or Teddy Kennedy at the same time. Electrons run at light speed through miles of transmission wires and power cables. Air conditioning keeps the whirring servers cool. Real estate has to be acquired and developed to house it all. Electrical grids have to be extended to the sites. And lots of electricity has to be generated, which means lots of carbon dioxide gets produced.
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