Renew Give a Gift Change Address ... WIRED Science Top Stories Magazine Wired Blogs All Wired Richard Branson Shares Eco-Vision of IT in Space By Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides Categories: Environment Space Yesterday, at the unveiling of Virgin Galactic's suborbital spaceship design, Richard Branson talked about how his commitment to the environment fits with the new spaceship. "It was Stephen Hawking who first got me thinking about this issue," Branson started. He went on to say that with the end of the oil era approaching and climate change progressing faster then the models predicted that the utilization of space for agricultural monitoring, climate science, and someday even space based solar power is essential. "Aviation is often singled out as a key component of climate change," he said, "While I believe that aviation has to get much more carbon efficient then it is today, it is important that people begin to realize that seemingly benign industries such as IT have in fact overtaken aviation in terms of their CO2 output." Branson commented that the nearly half billion servers around the world each are consuming hundreds of watts. He then added an interesting twist: what if we could literally take some of that heat off of the planet by someday using space as a repository for our information technology? | |
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