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Carlito Austin

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Aug 2, 2024, 5:08:00 AM8/2/24

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This rumor has recently resurfaced as a screenshot of a tweet and a response. The original tweet, from @BigThink in 2019, has been deleted, and the article that it was promoting has been corrected to remove the error.

A popular screenshot of a tweet claims, "Your Netflix binge-watching is making climate change worse, say experts. The emissions generated by watching 30 minutes of Netflix is the same as driving almost 4 miles."

The correction says the article originally "relied on data produced by the The Shift Project," which is a French think tank advocating a shift to a post-carbon economy. The article, which is about the carbon impact of streaming services, no longer contains any comparison between driving and Netflix.

According to its website, the specific claim about the half-hour of viewing came from an oral interview, quotes from which were published in AFP, a French cooperative news agency. The original statement on AFP was:

Finding the exact comparison between driving and Netflix is difficult, as all kinds of data fluctuate. As Kamiya wrote, watching on different devices and driving different cars affects the comparison. Even the year makes a difference, because energy efficiency for data transfer is growing rapidly, as is the efficiency of cars and the availability of electric cars. Driving at different speeds or using energy from different countries can influence these numbers, too.

The claim is attributed to The Shift Project, which describes it as an "error" that "appeared during an interview." Carbon emissions are complicated to gauge across different people who use different devices, drive different cars, get energy from different sources, and so on. However, an estimate from the International Energy Agency estimated that when this claim was made in 2019, 4 miles of driving had more similar carbon emissions to streaming 45 hours of Netflix.

The payload is riding aboard the Psyche probe, which is headed for an asteroid of the same name. On December 11, when the spacecraft was 19 million miles (30 million kilometers) away, it reached 267 Mbps, which NASA described as "comparable to broadband internet download speeds."

However, as Psyche has continued on its trajectory, the distances have become greater, and the rate at which data can be transmitted and received has tumbled. At 140 million miles, the project's goal was to reach a lofty 1 Mbps. Instead, engineers managed to get 25 Mbps out of the demonstration.

"We downlinked about 10 minutes of duplicated spacecraft data during a pass on April 8," said Meera Srinivasan, the project's operations lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California.

"Until then, we'd been sending test and diagnostic data in our downlinks from Psyche. This represents a significant milestone for the project by showing how optical communications can interface with a spacecraft's radio frequency comms system."

"We've learned a great deal about how far we can push the system when we do have clear skies, although storms have interrupted operations at both Table Mountain and Palomar on occasion," said Ryan Rogalin, the project's receiver electronics lead at JPL.

Relatively clear skies are required for optical communications, whereas slower radio communications are less weather-dependent. In one recent experiment, engineers arranged an antenna in one location and a detector in another to receive the same signal in concert. The approach could also be applied to ground stations to handle a receiver being forced offline by weather conditions.

One of the best distance running documentary film I've seen with real runners was "UNBREAKABLE: The Western States 100." It was about the 4 best Ultra Runners in the world all racing the most prestigious race and finding out who was the best in the world! Worth the watch. It got into each runners background, skipped through 100 miles without having it drag out and was compelling. This could be a template for a good series or make a montage of the best distance runners from each decade and match-ups through the years.