Hmm, not really. First of all, unplugging my laptop's 256gb hard drive and plugging it into another laptop, in ten seconds, would be equal to 25.6 gb/sec, or 0.

Hmm, not really. First of all, unplugging my laptop's 256gb hard drive and plugging it into another laptop, in ten seconds, would be equal to 25.6 gb/sec, or 0.0000256 petabytes per second. Even if you're doing the swap with desktop computers that are right next to each other, the largest hard drive [0] you can buy, and really fast switching, you would get a transfer rate of 0.003 petabytes/second. The US currently consumes an absolutely enormous amount of data, more than 23 exabytes/month [1]. (I looked up these numbers mostly because I was curious, and I gotta say 23 exabytes a month surprised me.) Secondly, the power that the human body can store in just a few minutes is pretty cool. You can think of a person who eats 2300 calories a day as a 2700 watt-hour battery. Such a battery would be pretty powerful: it holds the equivalent of roughly 300 smartphone charges. You can "charge" the human body in just a few minutes of eating calorie-dense food like nuts or peanut butter or fatty food. But to charge a 2700 watt-hour battery, comparable to the human body, you'd need to draw the maximum power you could (from a wall in a house with standard wiring) - for about two hours. Sure, I agree that the human body isn't really consuming the power until it gets fully digested. But the reality is that if I'm in a rush, I can wolf down an apple+190g peanut butter and be done 4 minutes later with 1200 calories in my body. Which is pretty useful in real life, at least for me. If my body instead "charged" from a wall outlet (which can usually deliver a lot of power, 1440W or so continuously) it would take an hour to provide me with 1200 calories. Sure, people often do eat slowly. But there have been many times in my life when there's not enough time for whatever reason, and taking an hour to eat a meal would be unacceptable. And it's times like that when I really appreciate that I can eat something fast, and "charge" my body at the rate of tens of kilowatts. [0] http://www.pcworld.com/article/3096292/storage/seagates-10tb-barracuda-pro-is-the-worlds-largest-consumer-hard-drive.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/3096292/storage/seagates-10tb... [1] http://www.cisco.com/c/m/en_us/solutions/service-provider/vni-forecast-highlights.html# http://www.cisco.com/c/m/en_us/solutions/service-provider/vn...