[Post author: Scott Butner]
Lunar Eclipse sequence – Feb 20 2008, originally uploaded by Scott Butner.
Couldn’t resist posting this sequence of photos of last night’s lunar eclipse, even though it has absolutely NOTHING to do with pollution prevention or information technology, much less their supposed intersection.
Though I will say that digital photography is a great example of dematerialization, the replacement of a material object with pure information. In “the old days” when I did film photography, I would have needed to go through dozens of pictures, a couple rolls of film, and the associated gallons of rinse water and processing chemicals, to come up with the same image. By working entirely in bits and bytes, I’m left using a small amount of electricity to charge the camera’s batteries.
Have we dematerialized all the products we can? What’s the next big breakthrough that will eliminate the need to make products, much less waste?
SB