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from the no-need-to-worry-about-toner-usage dept.
Students from the University of Leicester ( http://www.le.ac.uk ) have calculated how much paper would be required to physically print the Internet as we know it — and have found that, despite the Internet's enormous size, less than 1 per cent of the Amazon rainforest's trees would be required to accomplish it.
In order to work out how much paper would be required to print the Internet, students Evangeline Walker and George Harwood from the University of Leicester's Centre for Interdisciplinary Science investigated how many trees would be needed, using the Amazon rainforest as an example given its unprecedented scale on Earth.
The Amazon rainforest, situated in South America, is the largest rainforest on Earth, spanning 5.5 million square kilometres and housing approximately 400 billion trees.
The students used the English version of the popular website Wikipedia as an example of a website containing a large amount of data. They took ten random articles from Wikipedia, which provided an average of 15 pages required to print each article. They then multiplied this by the number of pages on Wikipedia alone — estimated to be roughly 4,723,991 at the time of writing — which resulted in 70,859,865 paper pages.
Applying this to the Internet at large, the students suggest that approximately 4.54 billion pages of paper would be required to print the Internet as we know it.
http://phys.org/news/2015-04-amazon-rainforest-internet.html
[Paper]: http://www.physics.le.ac.uk/jist/index.php/JIST/article/view/100/57
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @07:30PM
Since I gave that silly rant, I should obviously follow my own advice.
For those of you with an interest in energy production there is a not so new but very interesting and affordable long lasting technology called fresnel lenses.
These lenses are capable of generating upto 1,200 deg C of heat. This amount of heat is capable of sustaining a liquid metal battery such as those proposed by Donald Sadoway [http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to_renewable_energy?language=en]
The lenses work by using concentric rings to focus heat energy from the sun. However unlike almost all other technology in the energy sector producing a fresnel lense is simple cheap and easy because it's just a lense, no moving parts, no electronics. This simplicity leads itself to a practical price point (32" lense is about 250$ with max heat of 1,200deg c).
I purchased and have been testing with this lense for about a week off and on over the course of the last year or so. The lenses are heavy but powerful and you need welding goggles to wield them.
These types of technologies need not even directly store energy in a battery, hydroelectric dams when they have too much power suck water back up behind the resevoire wall creating a phsyical battery from it's contained force. Fresnel lenses could be utilized with a setup similar to a window farm [http://www.windowfarms.com/] (I built a system like this, it pushes beads of water up a tube that then drops down to a resevoir) where the lenses heat is utilized to fill a large container with water that can be released later over a water wheel.
(Score: 2) by CoolHand on Sunday April 26 2015, @02:16AM
If you want stories like that published on the site, you should write things like that up as submissions, instead of posting them as off-topic comments...
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