The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud.

Nowadays, we are so used to thinking of the 'Cloud' as a general virtual place designed to hold all our data, that to think of its physical and tangible presence seems impossible. Yet it is: the Cloud is not an actual cloud beyond our reach, the Cloud is in yet another room filled with pulsating, overheating, tangling technology.

What is required for the storage of the myriads of data of every single human on this earth is much more than just a virtual account, which finds its home exclusively in the corners of the Internet. It has reached a point where a single data centre can consume the electricity equivalent of 50,000 homes, its carbon footprint is larger than that of the airline industry.

The data centres that store this data are constantly monitored in every respect: the slightest change in temperature could result in a catastrophe, not to mention the weather and possible human error.