Happy Thought for 26 September 2025

 Have a Happy Thought: 

We use a lot of data in today’s world. IN fact, the total amount of data created and stored digitally is expected to reach 181 zettabytes this year. (A zettabyte is 2 to the 70th power, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes).


Moving all of this data around accounts for a lot of power usage today – every email (yes, including this one), shared document, or any other file digitally transferred takes energy to send, share, and store online.


Now, we’ve all at some point struggled to figure out the best way to transfer a file – maybe it’s something too large to send over email, or an odd file type that wouldn’t attach.


So, here are some alternatives that might a)take less energy; and b) actually be more efficient??


Option 1: Use a snowmobile. Yep, Amazon Web Services actually offers this as a way to transfer very large (100 petabytes = 10 to the 15th power, or 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes, still much smaller than a zettabyte) amounts of data into the cloud. Ok, so this isn’t actually loading data discs onto a snowmobile, it’s just a big shipping container filled with all the tech needed to take locally-stored data and put it into Amazon Web Services (AWS).


Option 2: Use a pigeon. Sounds too old-timey, you say? Well, even as late as the 1980’s, engineers at the very high-tech Lockheed plant used pigeons to transmit drawings and technical data. You see, they were creating Computer Aided Design (CAD) drawings in one office, and needed to get those to the test plant, about 25 miles (40km) away. No high-speed internet in those days, so they tried putting the data disks into a car... which took over an hour each way (yay, traffic). The fix to all of this? Photograph the drawings, attach the 35mm film to a pigeon, who would fly it to the plant to be developed/enlarged, and ready for work!


The best part of this story, to me, is this: “Over a 16-month period the pigeons transmitted hundreds of rolls of film and lost only two (because there are hawks in the area, the pigeons carried no classified data)” (from More Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley).


Happy data sharing!

Image: Pigeon with German miniature camera, during the First World War. Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-R01996,_Brieftaube_mit_Fotokamera.jpg: o.Ang.derivative work: Hans Adler, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en>, via Wikimedia Commons


If you are really geeky about data transfer, you might enjoy this online conversation about what actually constitutes “big data”, and which inspired this week’s post.

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