Help save the Rainforests. Buy a piece of land.

Student Couple Sells Virtual Land to Buy and Preserve Tropical Rainforest Territory

Hi, my name is Mark. My wife and I live in Germany and are both students, I am an architecture major, while my wife studies to become a primary school teacher.

We came up with this idea two years ago and didn't quite know how to get it realized. But as time went by we clung to our idea and developed our project one step at a time. We started studying books on php programming, business strategies, entrepreneurship and on the issues concerning our planet's rainforests and can now finally present to you our Experiment Earth.

On Experiment Earth we populate the world with images and links to other websites. Land can be bought from Experiment Earth, 1 Square Meter for 1 Cent.
Other users can bid on existing fields and sell/buy them from each other, much like shares on the stock exchange. Ground values develop. As visitor numbers go up, so are the area values on our map. Our virtual land has value, because advertisers are able to get traffic to their websites through their fields they own on Experiment Earth.
If you haven't participated yet, you can get get a free 1000 m2 field on our map by copying a promotion code here, Upload an image and link to your website. Visitors will be able to find your website as they browse our map.

Only very few studies have been made on the internet's energy consumption in the past. A study made by Jonathan Koomey of Berkley Lab in 1995 and then again in 1999 about energy consumption of information technology in the US estimated the total electricity usage by office and network equipment to about 74 TeraWatt-hours, about two percent of total electricity usage.

A more recent study by a consulting professor at Stanford University, who is also a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, estimates the total datacenter energy consumption accounting for about 1.2% of total energy consumption in the US.

I found an article at infoworld.com written by David L. Margulius. He mentiones first of all that this study took into consideration only the datacenters, but not the personal computers which are used by the millions to connect to the internet. And he also converts this energy consumption into dollars which makes it easier for us to comprehend. About 3 billion dollars are consumed by datacenters, including servers, cooling, and auxiliary infrastructure, while the grand total of energy usage amounts to 300 billion dollars in the United States. If we took the personal computers into consideration calculating based on Margulius' estimates (which are on the very low end!) it would result in another 3 billion dollars.

While there are other claims that world wide internet consumption were around 5%-6% of 15,000 billion kWh (about 1500 billion dollars, resulting in 0.05 * 1500 = 75 billion dollars) we can all just agree that, how David puts it, "...Cyberspace is sucking a lot of juice."

According to Wikipedia, our planet's total energy consumption amounts to about 15,000 kW [Wikipedia World Energy Consumption]. Our world's electricity prices average about $ 0.1 USD/kWh according to www.solarbuzz.com. Thtis totals in 1,500 billion dollars of electricity costs worldwide. Let's say the internet consumes only 1% of these total costs, which honestly I think it is more (read "The Internet's Energy Consumption" above). According to this calculation the internet uses 150 billion dollars in electricity (this is just the electricity bill to have the internet up and running, not covered are manufacturing of computers, networks, datacenters..).

Let's now on the other hand look at the amazon rainforest. Since 1988 average deforestation rate was about 15,000 km2 - 20,000km2 per year [Wikipedia Amazon Rainforest].

According to WorldLandTrust.org and WWF, these organisations are able to save and preserve one square meter for about 10 cents.

Let's now say 1% of total energy costs of the internet were invested in buying and preserving the amazon rain forest. 1% of 150 billion dollars are 1.5 billion dollars.

If we had 1.5 billion dollars to buy amazon rain forest we would be able to buy and save 15,000 km2, exactly the amount we are losing every year.

With our website we are trying to set a standard, We are giving 10% of are total sales and currently 100% of our actual profits to the rainforests. Compared to electricity consumption it will result in 1000 times or more of that required one percent to completely save the amazon rainforest.

Buy land now and get your favorite spots before others do!