Desert Island Whimsy in the 21st Century

I listen to Desert Island Disks. I’m not a fanatic but I quite like it as part of my Sunday morning routine.

 

 

I’ve finally gotten round to a bit of whimsy that occurs to me about one time in three when I listen to the show.

 

How many disks could I take with me using the same weight of recording medium but 21^st Century technology?

 

The number surprised me.

 

Firstly, let me deal with the gramophone. I’m going to allow myself to swap the gramophone for some form of generator and battery charging kit and a small pair of speakers.

 

Now, the Disks.

 

8 Disks, singles, weighing approximately 90 grams each come to 720 grams.

 

An iPod weighs 140 grams. This leaves me 580 grams of recording material.

 

The biggest capacity USB flash drive I’ve seen available is 128 GB. And it weighs approximately 30 grams, so with my 580 grams I can take 19 drives totalling 2,432 GB plus the iPod itself at 160 GB for a grand total of 2,592 GB.

 

At approximately 250 tracks per GM I make 648,000 tracks. 

 

Now my marginal utility for an additional track of music falls of pretty sharply after the first 200,000 or so. So I’m going to allow myself to split my digital media into three equal parts, one part for music, one part for ebooks and one part for video.

 

This brings my music collection down to just my favourite 216,000 tracks. Give or take allowing for the fact that I quite like classical music this are longer.

 

For my library I use 864 GB. At 100 books per GB I get 86,400 books. That’s a pretty impressive library.

 

Video is pretty demanded of data storage so I only get 155,520 minutes of video. Splitting this evenly between film and television I get 389 2 and a bit hour films and 1,296 1 hour episodes of television, more if I don’t have adverts.

 

I think I’d be able to take pretty much every piece of music and every book I could conceivably get round to enjoying. I’m a bit limited on the video front, but that’s okay I’ll have plenty of work to do. For a start I’ll have a number of books on agriculture, boat building and navigation.

 

I’m glad I did this little exercise. I think it’s a neat illustration of how technology has improved our lives and how we can continue to enjoy economic growth whilst using less of the world’s resources per head and in total.

 

The only obstacle to my enjoyment of a lifetime of listening pleasure is the modern paucity of desert islands.

 

DDW