5 ms·
From what I remember, the impact was pretty minimal. Water has a huge capacity for heat so the temperature was elevated only when very close to the data center.
by slaymaker1907 6y ago
From what I remember, the impact was pretty minimal. Water has a huge capacity for heat so the temperature was elevated only when very close to the data center.
- reaperducer 6y agothe impact was pretty minimal We used to say that about plastics in the ocean. And landfills. And light pollution. And noise pollution. And space junk. And on and on and on. Heck, not that many decades ago there were responsible people who thought that air pollution was no big deal because there's plenty of air, and it's just fine if California allows rich car collectors to keep buying leaded gasoline long after other states outlawed it. The impact is "minimal."
- golergka 6y agoThis is a non-argument, because it can be used on literally anything, up to lighting one match.
- closeparen 6y agoThe impact of cooling a building on the surface is definitely higher.
- tbabb 6y agoThis reads like you have not done any calculation to determine whether the entire ocean can be heated by any plausible number of datacenters or not.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- reaperducer 6y agoWhat does it matter if the entire ocean is heated? Power plants aren't allowed to dump unlimited quantities of hot water into the ocean. Why is it OK for a data center?
- emteycz 6y agoThere is a difference between understanding of different fields of science. We understand temperature in large bodies pretty well - and we know that it's nearly impossible to sink that many servers to do anything.
- ants_a 6y agoI once read that using ZFS was supposed to boil the oceans.
- emteycz 6y agoPeople tend to overestimate and also like to use hyperboles
- tgragnato 6y agoYeah, it’s a theoretical limit. You don’t need to boil any ocean to use ZFS. Reference: >>> If 64 bits isn't enough, the next logical step is 128 bits. That's enough to survive Moore's Law until I'm dead, and after that, it's not my problem. But it does raise the question: what are the theoretical limits to storage capacity? Although we'd all like Moore's Law to continue forever, quantum mechanics imposes some fundamental limits on the computation rate and information capacity of any physical device. In particular, it has been shown that 1 kilogram of matter confined to 1 liter of space can perform at most 1051 operations per second on at most 1031 bits of information [see Seth Lloyd, "Ultimate physical limits to computation." Nature 406, 1047-1054 (2000)]. A fully-populated 128-bit storage pool would contain 2128 blocks = 2137 bytes = 2140 bits; therefore the minimum mass required to hold the bits would be (2140 bits) / (1031 bits/kg) = 136 billion kg. That's a lot of gear. To operate at the 1031 bits/kg limit, however, the entire mass of the computer must be in the form of pure energy. By E=mc2, the rest energy of 136 billion kg is 1.2x1028 J. The mass of the oceans is about 1.4x1021 kg. It takes about 4,000 J to raise the temperature of 1 kg of water by 1 degree Celcius, and thus about 400,000 J to heat 1 kg of water from freezing to boiling. The latent heat of vaporization adds another 2 million J/kg. Thus the energy required to boil the oceans is about 2.4x106 J/kg \* 1.4x1021 kg = 3.4x1027 J. Thus, fully populating a 128-bit storage pool would, literally, require more energy than boiling the oceans.
- snovv_crash 6y agoNothing exists in a vacuum. Of course comparing having a datacentre to not having a datacentre shows that having it has higher ecological impact. But that wasn't really the option now, was it?
- legohead 6y agoif humans output the entirety of their energy usage into the ocean, it would take ~8000 years to raise the temperature by 1 degree.
- revax 6y agoThis is basic thermodynamics stuff. Looks like energy used in datacenter in 2018 was around 200TWh. If you use all this energy to heat only the mediterranean sea, you will have a change of temperature of 0.00006°C. I used this calculator https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/specific-heat https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/specific-heat
- tedsanders 6y agoFYI, your comment is wildly misleading. Thermal pollution is real and has a wide research literature. The worry is not that that the average temperature of the oceans will rise. The worry is that the local temperature of the ocean will rise. This is exactly what happens with other forms of thermal pollution. One example studied for decades was California's San Onofre nuclear power generating station. It has been subject to regulations regarding its thermal pollution into the ocean. They built long pipes so that the temperature increase from the cooling water could heat the ocean gradually over a wide area rather than severely in a narrow area. It's the same principle as a CPU heatsink. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_pollution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_pollution https://authors.library.caltech.edu/26008/ https://authors.library.caltech.edu/26008/ https://www.worldcat.org/title/ecological-effects-of-thermal-discharges/oclc/20693132 https://www.worldcat.org/title/ecological-effects-of-thermal... For what it's worth, I personally found your comment quite distasteful. Instead of trying to understand what you didn't know, you knocked down a straw man and pretended like it was obvious and backed by science.
- revax 6y agoThank you for your insightful comments, I stand corrected. I didn't think of the local effects.