Blog
Bleeding Love vs. the Apollo Moon Mission
Written by Jimmy
Another little gift to the left brain troops out there. We already have a little fan club at a certain Private Equity firm that loved the Minard’s Invasion of Moscow blog. This one is about memory storage capacity and the Apollo moon mission.
Okay. I do a lot of speeches around the world about ‘consumer of 2020’ (don’t ask!) and one of the issues is to look at impact of long term trends on consumer behaviour. One of the most compelling trends is the continued impact of Moore’s law and the continued band width explosion. It is hard to get this point across; it is hard to have folks really consider how much our lives have been transformed from 2000-2010 and therefore get them to consider 2020. The fact is we take all the technology stuff for granted.
So I try to bring it alive with the following two little facts:
- If you tried to put the memory capacity of an Apple I-Pod on to the super-computers of the 1950’s (they designed all US nuclear weopons!) you would need a super-computer the size of …Cyprus (which from the air looks a lot like a guitar… sort of an air guitar). That is ridiculous.
- If you took the entire memory capacity of the computers used to run the Apollo moon missions (5 super computers with 1MB capacity and 3-4 on board computers), it would equal 1 song stored on MP3 file. Or, another way to look at that — an average I-Pod can store 150,000 Apollo Moon Missions. Ridiculous.
If you extrapolate forward to 2020 funny things begin to happen. As my son has pointed out: we continously over-estimate the changes the future will hold for massive macro infrastructure issues (as we point out in Major Matt Mason, the 60’s kids all thought we’d be going to work on mono-rails by now and vacationing on Mars), and we continuously under-estimate the impact that changes in micro information issues will have. No one anticipated an I-Pod touch or Google — just look at the Star Trek Communicators. He loves to point out that the ‘advanced’ scene in Total Recall was Arnold talking on this massive phone that emerged from suitcase. Oops, this is a separate topic that really isn’t about music.
So what’s the point? We put together songs all the time at Abubilla Music. And one song is about 70 mb in .wav and 5mb in .mp3. So everyday, we use up 12 moon missions of data in .wav and 1 moon mission when we convert to .mp3. Are our songs worth it? I mean a moon mission! Absolutely not. But, … at least they’re ‘more with it’ than Bleeding Love. And that’s all I’m going to say about that.
Jimmy on a Tuesday, in Las Vegas (don’t ask!)