Stodge.org

Not so long ago, a gmail invite was a precious thing, a commodity in short supply circulated amongst only uber-geeks and lunix hacker-terrorists. Having distainfully avoided becoming a gmailer (cos I didnt believe the hype), I now have an account courtesy of Leo Mirani (A friend I met in Bombay via iTunes). Now that I am in, I too have the ability to invite up to six more people to partake of Gmail.

Given that the world’s population is approximately 6.3 billion people and 10% of these have access to the internet, if each person was able to pass on a gmail invite to an online friend, the entire internet-using population of the world would be on gmail within 12 generations of invites.

Now assuming all this was possible, at peak, this many gmail users would require 6.2 x 10^5 Terrabytes of storage. Assuming further that Google store all this information on 250Gb IDE hard-disk drives, they would require 2.5 x 10^6 drives to store all that data.

The chances are that Google use at least RAID5, which typically requires 25% redundancy, and each of those hard drives consumes about 40W of electrical power. I would estimate the power consumption of the hard-disks used by the gmail system to be 125Gigawatt.

Your Gmail will require 99 more of these…

To put this in perspective, Sizewell ‘B’ (the UK’s most advanced nuclear power station) produces only 1.25 GW per reactor. So gMail operating at it’s theoretical maximum would require 100 nuclear power stations to run at full blast.

Therefore I conclude, that by using gmail, you help propel the world into heat-death or nuclear winter. Now is that what you want to happen?

PS. I still have 6 gmail invites left, so let me know if you want one. They are quite good for sending large files.