Nick Carr must get lots of letters, because he's done a back-of-the-envelope calculation and figured out that Second Life avatars "consume about as much electricity as your average Brazilian". (That's Brazilian person, not beauty treatment.)
He picks up on a post by Tony Walsh who wonders 'Is Second Life sustainable ecologically?'
There's a certain amount of approximation, but it starts with Linden Lab having 4,000 servers, all running all the time, which "house" (embody? virtualise?) about 15,000 avatars in Second Life - though the number is growing.
A quick bit of totting-up (we haven't checked his numbers, so corrections welcome) and reckons that
an avatar consumes 1,752 kWh per year. By comparison, the average human, on a worldwide basis, consumes 2,436 kWh per year. So there you have it: an avatar consumes a bit less energy than a real person, though they're in the same ballpark.
And then he goes on...
if we limit the comparison to developed countries, where per-capita energy consumption is 7,702 kWh a year, the avatars appear considerably less energy hungry than the humans. But if we look at developing countries, where per-capita consumption is 1,015 kWh, we find that avatars burn through considerably more electricity than people do.
More narrowly still, the average Brazilian consumes 1,884 kWh, which, given the fact that my avatar estimate was rough and conservative, means that your average Second Life avatar consumes about as much electricity as your average Brazilian.
Not the wax kind, either. If there's one topic that's going to be increasingly important in the coming years, it's going to be processing power per watt - and, I suspect, whether the consumption of that watt is actually necessary.
