The Planet Needs a New Internet

'When climate change comes for our coffee and our wine, we'll moan
about it on Twitter, read about it on our favorite websites, and watch
diverting videos on YouTube to fill the icy hole in our hearts. We'll
do all this until the websites go dark and the networks go down
because eventually, climate change will come for our internet, too.
That is, unless we can get the web ready for the coming storms. Huge
changes will be needed because right now, the internet is
unsustainable. On the one hand, rising sea levels threaten to swamp
the cables and stations that transmit the web to our homes; rising
temperatures could make it more costly to run the data centers
handling ever-increasing web traffic; wildfires could burn it all
down. On the other, all of those data centers, computers, smartphones,
and other internet-connected devices take a prodigious amount of
energy to build and to run, thus contributing to global warming and
hastening our collective demise.

To save the internet and ourselves, we'll need to harden and relocate
the infrastructure we've built, find cleaner ways to power the web,
and reimagine how we interact with the digital world. Ultimately, we
need to recognize that our tremendous consumption of online content
isnâ(TM)t free of consequences -- if we're not paying, the planet is.
You probably don't think about it when you're liking a photo or
reading an article, but everything you do online is underpinned by a
globe-spanning labyrinth of physical infrastructure. There are the
data centers hosting the web and managing enormous flows of
information on the daily. There are the fiber cables transmitting data
to into our homes and offices, and even across oceans. There are cell
towers sending and receiving countless calls and texts on the daily.'

-- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/08/22/1733253

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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