Future of Computing and Digital Archives

L-Dog · Guest

I am a graduate student in Library Information Sciences and I am currently researching and writing a major paper for my own self interest (i.e. not required) about the future of digitization projects and digital libraries/archives.

Obviously, you know where I'm headed with this: it's all doomed sooner or later. With no electricity to keep the computers running, we won't have access to the gazillions of bits and bytes of culture and history and science that people are frantically trying to "preserve" in electronic media. It's all quite myopic, ludicrous, absurd when confronted by peak oil. Even this whole ruckus about Google digitizing the great libraries of the United States is ultimately futile if we will not have the electricity to access the files.

Information Needed:

1) Hard, solid data on how much power an average microcomputer eats up when left on 24/7.

2) How much energy do small to large servers suck?

3) I heard the bursting of the Dot.Bomb bubble saved the nation a lot of energy.

4) Are our critical telecommunications infrastructures safeguarded with backup generators? What kind of plans do people in the energy industry have for the depletion of the electricity supply?

5) General opinions about the future of computing in N. America. How long will be able to keep the computers running? Isn't all this digitization mania all for naught in view of Peak Oil and Peak Natural Gas?

Dukat_Reloaded · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Jul 31, 2005 Posts: 1007

Depending on the type of computer, they can use very little or alot. A typical current highperformance desktop computer can use upto 500watts, as most computers PSU's are rated upto 500watts. There is no reason why a computer does not need to use more power than what a typical digital wrist watch uses. If all the technology was imbedded into a single chip or two, the computer would use very little ie Substiuting Hard Drive for Flash Memory, lcd monitor with no back light, slow speed low watt cpu, limited graphics controller. I could see a computer like this running all day on perhaps less than 1AA sized battery.

As your question mainly asked to access archived information material, I see why this computer could be upto the task for simple interent activities, perhaps even watch videos. For complex content creation like video editing, it would not be upto the task. Data servers would use alot more power, but one data server would feed perhaps millions of people, so the power usage would be a problem for large datacenters as they service perhaps the entire population in the future, and to divide that by all the people, it would work out to about .01watt per person.

NiKfUrY69-2 · Guest

MICROFICHE!

Low to no power requirement.

Reader is the size of a monitor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microfiche

http://business.listings.ebay.com/Office-Printing-Shipping_Microfilm-Microfiche_W0QQsacatZ61673QQsocmdZListingItemList

Lter - NiK

L-Dog · Guest

Much thanks to both persons who replied to my post. Very useful information. As well, I did not notice the excellent information on computing in the recent post "Computer Energy Efficiency".

Actually, my interest is more focused on the long-range viability of digital information access and retrieval in a post-carbon society. What will be the future face of the WWW? We think the internet will be around forever as culture and society become more and more "virtual". Well, things will get a lot less virtual when our civilization hits the brick wall that we're speeding towards.

Frankly, culture will be reconfigured massively because of peak oil. For instance, all those addicted consumers of iPods and any form of electronically mediated music will hunger for the sounds they get from flipping a switch. Live, acoustic musicians will be in great demand. It will involve a new quality of listening, performance, and community that may just be quite refreshing. Let's hope the crash will not kill of too many musicians, especially the acoustic players.

RealJoe

This is an important subject because it appears that not only is a massive loss of cultural and technological knowledge certain to be disastrous, it is also extremely probable. There was a lengthy and quite technical article on the high energy input and need for elaborate (and energy intensive) technological complexity needed to produce IC chips that I read in recent months. It was a link from one of the main peak oil forums, but I tried several searches and failed to find it. It would address your questions in great detail however.

The guise is that integrated ciruit production is an advanced technology that uses massive amounts of energy and just a few failures of the underlying system that supports this manufacturing technology will doom it. For example, IC chips are manufactured in highly controlled clean rooms, because even particles of a few hundred microns in size can interfere with the performance of these IC chips. These clean rooms, their filtering and control components, the uniforms and protocol costs a lot, I think the article mentioned a figure of over a billion dollar (don't quote me!) for one clean room IC production unit such as Intel uses.

It would not take a lot of disruption to paralyze and then prevent IC production in such a clean room and lots of technological components and resources to restart such a facility. The article concluded by saying that IC production (let alone nanotechnology) is highly vulnerable and that we shouldn't necessarily believe that the high tech industries will survive peak oil in anything like their present capability.

I am not sure I am doing this brilliant and scary article justice and hope you can find it. There are a lot of computers out there at present, the knowledge bases related to computing technology seems to be widely dispersed and we as a society can always cannibalize to save critical functions. Still, this is a weakness few are looking at.

I have in the past worked as an archivist and also am a fanatic book and recording collector. I do know that magnetic media as a whole is considered to have an archive lifespan of only five years. Based upon my own experience magnetic tapes and disks (of course these are essentially obselete technologies today) experience much deterioration within 15 to 20 years without much use at all. I am sure digital, optical storage devices are much better, but don't know to what extent.

This is just an aside, but is reflective of our culture's wasteful ways. I got into financial trouble recently for various reasons and lost a collection of maybe 800 to 900 books on science, engineering, computing technologies (many more tapes, floppies, etc) and environmental science I had in a storage locker. No one I contacted came to my rescue as they seen my collection as a waste of my time and focus and I could not convince anyone of the collection's value.

When you look at how the American culture I live in is disposing of all previous cultural artifiacts like books, magazines, print material in general, magnetic tapes, playback technologies and recordings in favor of a transfer to an all digital culture, you can see we are really setting ourselves up for a major and totally destructive loss. Good luck with your paper.

L-Dog · Guest

RealJoe: Superb response! Much thanks ideed. I will search for that article or get one of my many competent colleagues to find it. We're supposed to be the best information detectives around, i.e. librarians.

lowem

In related news, CD-R's apparently do not last forever ... Laughing

"The Myth of the 100-Year CD-ROM"
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RealJoe

L-Dog,
Hi, thanks for the kudos. When I said the article was on one of the peak oil forums, I did not mean particularly to this web site, so pardon if I misled. I believe I found the article I referred to from a link on www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net, although I am not comletely certain. I read it sometime in the middle to late summer of this year. Other web sites I browse include www.energybulletin.net, the Oil Drum site, www.321energy.com, www.financialsense.com and the energyresource group at Yahoo. Hope this helps in your search.

Aimrehtopyh

Call me crazy but I think that a digital printer that inscribes clay tablets would be the ultimate. Clay is cheap and you could easily automate the whole process.

Dude makes clay tablets at home.

The affordability and convenience might be low compared to other media but the longevity is proven and unmatched. You would certainly be more selective about the info you choose to store, that's okay though. Think of all the poor archeologists of the future poring over those American Idol-related teeneage blog entries you so faithfully archived. Stick to the important stuff. 99% of Babylonian tablets are still unexcavated.

I'm not sure if english text would be the best format to use. Chinese might be more dense and a digital stream would definitely be more flexible. Be sure to include some pictures