Tag Archives: earth
Using the Earth as a hard drive?
…and somehow, it’s probably possible within the next decade or so.
From Boing Boing Gadgets:
BLDGBLOG does some fascinating navel gazing on the subject of hard drive storage on the planetary scale: if ferromagnetically charged minerals can be arranged to make hard drives, what’s stopping us from turning Earth into one giant binary storage capsule, short of the technology?
I kid you not. In years to come – we might be using the earth as our hard drive. I’m not talking about terabytes here, not even petabytes – nope, if we used the earth as our hard drive, I couldn’t even begin to imagine the amount of data a hard drive of that size would hold.
If a 1.8″ drive can hold a quarter of a gigabyte, then the earth, measuring 6371km in diameter, would hold a hell of a lot more – obviously.
Good luck with those seek times, though. You random access times would be shot to pieces (unless you had heads that travelled at the speed of light). 
Cool, huh?
Australia ‘destroying life on Earth’
AUSTRALIA’S use of coal and carbon emissions policies are guaranteeing the “destruction of much of the life on the planet”, a leading NASA scientist has written in a letter to Barack Obama.
[…]
In the letter he says: “Australia exports coal and sets atmospheric carbon dioxide goals so large as to guarantee destruction of much of the life on the planet.”
via Australia ‘destroying life on Earth’ | National Breaking News | News.com.au.
Eh? Come again?
C’mon – surely you cannot be serious.