Many people make the argument that the information age industries don’t actually produce any real, tangible… things. That may well be true, but all those virtual bits of information still take up space on the planet when they’re stored. And we may be rapidly heading towards a crisis in storage: the world is currently generating just slightly less digital information than it has space to store it — something like 161,000,000,000 gigabytes of information is generated per year, and there is about 185,000,000,000 gigabytes of storage globally. But by 2010, according to research firm IDC, the generation of information will exceed the ability to store it — they estimate 988,000,000,000 gigabytes by then. [via siliconvalley.com]
This is what we are producing as a planet: billions and billions of bits, accompanied by greenhouse gases and carbon emissions, fueled by fossil fuels and stored in petrochemical cases.
Data storage is an issue that has creeped up on us slowly, even at home. In my home office I have something like 7 or 8 hard drives, each one filled with data; hundreds of CD- and DVD-ROMs storing even more stuff; there are even hard disks in my bedroom storing television shows and in the living room in the DVR. Elsewhere in the house are iPods, a cell phone, little USB drives… all storing data. There are hard drives and disks in my closets; in my mailbox, waiting for me to come home, is a DVD from Netflix storing data. I wouldn’t be surprised to find some kind of data storage device in my garage or bathroom.
I think this weekend I will start coming through the billions and billions of data files in my house, mercilessly deleting those that posterity doesn’t need.
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