[Starlink] Reducing Eenergy Consumption and Carbon Foot Print of Satellites Network

[Ulrich Speidel]

Like many others, the august institution that I work for has set itself 
the goal to score better in the international university rankings.

There are brownie points in rankings these days when it comes to 
sustainability. You just wish that university management and those who 
do the ranking actually understood sustainability.

So at a lot of universities, they have discovered (or at least think 
that they have) that exams on paper are bad, and that going online is 
environmentally friendly. That's because that paper requires a lot of 
trees to make (ignoring for a moment that many modern papers contain 
large amount of recycled paper).

On the Internet, we learn that making 1 metric ton of paper causes about 
1 ton of CO2 emissions. Wow that's a lot. Now the exam scripts for my 
students are usually under 20 pages A4. An A4 page weighs about 5 grams. 
So my entire exam is 100 g or less in CO2 emissions from paper. Add 
another 20 g CO from printing.

Now my experience is that if you let students sit online exams, around 
half of the class will cheat. These days, you do that with ChatGPT. Now 
let's assume there are 10 questions in the exam, and each takes two 
queries to ChatGPT to get right. I've asked ChatGPT how much CO2 a query 
to it produces, and it says between 5 and 20 grams. So we'll get between 
100 and 400 g of CO2 here. Say 250 g on average. That's around 125 g per 
student, slightly more than producing a printed exam produced. Add to 
that the power used by student devices, and the paper exam looks 
positively environmentally friendly again.

On 28/11/2024 11:39 pm, David Fernández via Starlink wrote:
> Hi Hesham,
>
> You may check this report, in case you missed it, for ideas on how to 
> reduce energy consumption and carbon footprint, in general for the 
> audiovisual sector, but satellite distribution of video may be 
> considered there:
> https://en.arcep.fr/news/press-releases/view/n/environment-071024.html
>
> You may be interested in following this IETF group, too:
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/green/about
>
> This workshop already happened, but you may get something from there 
> too, about the development of energy neutral devices:
> https://6g-conference.dnac.org/2024/en-iot-2024
>
> Considering that most of the CO2 is emitted during a device 
> fabrication (e.g. 79% for laptops, according to Atos), making them 
> last long and being modular and repairable may be the best way to 
> reduce the carbon footprint (and the increasing amount of e-waste).
>
> Regards,
>
> David
>
> Date: Sat, 23 Nov 2024 11:16:11 -0800
> From: Hesham ElBakoury <helbakoury at gmail.com>
> To: Dave Taht via Starlink <starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net>
> Subject: [Starlink] Reducing Eenergy Consumption and Carbon Foot Print
>         of Satellites Network
> Message-ID:
>         
> <CAFvDQ9p6R9wdGFri3YPdU5=25FjyD6iN5yT+oW7XkgCZk77bow at mail.gmail.com 
> <mailto:25FjyD6iN5yT%2BoW7XkgCZk77bow at mail.gmail.com>>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> I appreciate your input and pointers to publications regarding how to
> reduce energy consumption and carbon footprint of satellites network.
>
> Thanks
> Hesham
>
> _______________________________________________
> Starlink mailing list
> Starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink

-- 
****************************************************************
Dr. Ulrich Speidel

School of Computer Science

Room 303S.594 (City Campus)

The University of Auckland
u.speidel at auckland.ac.nz 
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
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