Second Life Avatars Consume As Much Electricity As Brazilians
by Celine Ruben-Salama, New York, NY 
on 01. 9.07
According to the website itself, Second Life is a 3D online digital world imagined, created and owned by its residents. Many real companies such as American Apparel and Sears are represented virtually within its borders. The community has even produced real life millionaires! Clearly this virtual world and its near 2.5 million resident avatars have real life implications. With roughly 4000 servers running at full power at all times, the environmental implications of Second Life are not negligible. Fellow blogger Nicholas Carr recently did a back-of-the-envelope calculation comparing the impact of actual humans and Second Life avatars. Stunningly, it turns out that the average Second Life avatar consumes about as much electricity as your average Brazilian! If curious, you can follow the math that leads to this conclusion here. Perhaps introducing carbon offsets – real or virtual – to Second Life is in order… Has anyone done that yet? :: Rough Type
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it should be noted that this calculation is done for the approx. 12,500 avatars that are logged in at any given time, not the millions available to log in.
And the notion of carbon offsets should take into consideration the difference between playing Second Life and whatever else the average participant would be doing for entertainment. Sometimes this probably would mean Second Life is consuming more than the alternatives (reading a library book under a CFL?) and sometimes less (driving 20 miles to see a movie).
So if avs in SL consume as much electricity as your average Brazilian, what about the hundreds (maybe thousands) of Brazilians that have avs in SL?
Wrap your head around THAT!
Also, how much electricity does the internet consume? According to my calculations, it takes up as much as Brazilians playing SL and blogging about it.
;)
We are working on bringing offsets for avatars into Second Life. We have a space on the Better World Island. The project is going to link with the UK based CO2 Balance. We are just constructing the necessary systems to allow us to offer the offsets in-world.
Do they have electricity in Brazil? :-) JK
Still, the fact that the article doesn't have a number is telling. I wonder how much electricity the treehugger.com servers use.
One Man. One Year. $100,000 online. How's he doing it?
http://www.oneyeargoal.com
Interesting information, please write to be updated when.
Thanks in advance!
Carr's facetious analysis might as easily be applied to any computer-based activity or diversion. He misses the much more important point that if you use immersive 3D environments for events, instead of hosting them in the real world, you get most of the same interpersonal bang for your (much, much smaller) buck, and save hundreds and hundreds of tons of carbon.
We (world2worlds.com) do professional events in Second Life, scaled to match real-world conferences. With 2000 unique attendees (and six days' duration), doing a show like this in any top-tier destination city would cost a minimum of $1.5-$3 million, would require six months' planning, and would generate about 1200 tons of carbon, plus a huge nonrecoverable waste stream. In Second Life, that show costs well under $100,000 USD to produce, has a two-month time-window for sponsorship and audience marketing, and generates, in toto, counting all sources and sinks, about half the carbon output of ONE average American family - roughly 4 tons (or in Carr's terms, equivalent to the annual carbon output of about five Brazilian rural households).