Infoworld suggests spam prevented Mars colonies and renewable energy

[Paul D. Fernhout]

From:
"Five-year plan: 8 problems IT must solve | Adventures in IT - InfoWorld"
http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/five-year-plan-8-problems-it-must-solve-508?page=0,2
"IT fix No. 6: Spam: If it were possible to redirect the time and effort
poured into antispam and antimalware code over the last 10 years, we'd
already have colonies on Mars and probably a new form of renewable energy.
As it stands, however, we're not much better off than we were five years
ago. The volume of spam has stayed fairly consistent, at somewhere between
95 and 98 percent of all email. ..."

They may have meant that jokingly, I'm not sure, but it strikes me as
probably true. Certainly if you add in the time everyone has spend dealing
with spam as individuals, the amount in enormous.

See also:
http://www.focus.com/articles/it-security/real-cost-spam/
"Spam may be cheap for the people who send it, but it can be a serious
expense for your business. According to a study conducted earlier this year
by Nucleus Research Inc., spam management costs U.S. businesses more than
$71 billion annually in lost productivity � $712 per employee."

And that is just business cost -- not the time cost for individuals.

NASA's budget is about $19 billion a year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget

So, spam is literally costing society about three or four NASAs a year
(maybe more if you include individual time costs). Can you imagine the
equivalent of four more NASAs devoted each solely to creating space habitats
on the Moon, Mars, the Asteroids, and at L5?

And to put a plug in for our sponsor: :-)

http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2008/11/calculating-true-cost-of-fighting-spam.html

Of course, so much of Wiki spam and so on may be to game the Google search
engine (and other engines), so Google giveth and Google taketh away. :-)

See also my related points here on competition and makework:
"Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century
economics:
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery

A few people trying to make a little money with spam waste everyone's time
and keep us from having space habitats -- just so they can prosper in an
increasingly obsolete social order. The computers and networks that make
spam possible also make possible robotics and other automation, better
design, and voluntary social networks that can do most of the work in our
society. This is allowing the emergence of movements towards a gift economy,
a basic income for everyone (social security regardless of age), democratic
resource-based planning, and improved local subsistence by 3D printing,
agricultural robotics, and renewable energy.

But, spam is one of the things that keep humanity from realizing that future
(including colonies on Mars) as a sort of social "knot", where the fact that
spammers chew up so much social productivity leads to artificial scarcity
that causes spammers to keep spamming rather than be content with a basic
income.

So, spam is "ironic", as in the meaning of my sig below. :-(

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of
abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.