The Physical Archeology of the Cloud-Based Internet: Prince William and Loudon Counties, Virginia

     Every time we use our phones or computers, we draw upon a huge physical infrastructure of cables and satellites and server farms, an infrastructure that is, intentionally(!), invisible to us.  Nevertheless, all of these components that make digital text possible are immensely expensive in dollars and in social costs.  Satellites are rapidly using up Earth's available orbital space and dangerous space junk is threatening existing and future orbitals, but space junk and satellites are hard to quantify and see.  Submarine fiber-optic cables that link national Internets together into the world's digital library also are invisible and unnoticed by most of us except when some cataclysm severs one, as happened to the inhabitants of Tonga when an undersea stratovolcano erupted on January 15, 2022.  Server farms, where textual data is stored and transmitted to our devices, tend to arrive with a thump, at least for those in their immediate vicinity.  After their installation, they are rendered invisible to the general public, or at least as hard to notice as can be for things that are so huge.  If you are interested in writing your midterm paper about the server farms compared with some similar function of print text (libraries, printers, publishers), you might compare their ecological impact with that of paper making and ink production, the power consumption of printing presses, etc.  What is the projected lifespan of a server farm or satellite, vs. the lifespan of a library or printing press?  Please don't let this example limit your approaches to comparing this aspect of digital text production with print.  I'm just trying to stimulate creative thinking.  But to our example, very close to Goucher . . .  based on the reporting in Antonio Olivo, "Fight over data centers roils rural Prince William," The Washington Post, Metro, 30 October 2022.
     Farmers and homeowners in the Pageland Lane community of Prince William County, Virginia, have been debating developers' plan to bulldoze their properties to create the "Digital Gateway," a "2100-acre hub to the world's internet traffic" (Olivo C1).  The project would construct 8 more data centers (server farms with attendent cooling facilities) that will add to neighboring Loudon County's nearby 33 server farms, "home to the world's largest concentration of data centers, with about 140 [total  buildings] occupying 25 million square feet" of space (Olivo C6).  For comparison, Goucher College's entire 257 acre campus is about 12,500,000 square feet, or about half that size, and much of it is woodland and fields.  In 2015, many years ago, Data Center Frontier reported that Northern Virginia had only 60 server farms totalling 6 million square feet (Miller).  Is that arithmetic, or exponential growth?  What do you suspect another seven years will bring, and where will you be then?
    
Additional articles if you are really into this topic!:

     Alexander Gillis, "Yottabyte (YB)," TechTarget, updated 9/20/21.  Note this article is now years old and its information, other than the basic facts about prefixes and their numerical meaning, are suspect.  Especially consider the assertion, in September 2021, that "Currently, there is nothing that can be measured on a yottabyte scale."  In that same year (see above) Gillis was reporting that the NSA's Bluffdale, Utah server farm was estimated to have yottabyte capacity.
     Rich Miller, "The Top 10 Cloud Campuses," Data Center Frontier, 23 November 2015. https://datacenterfrontier.com/top-10-cloud-campuses/ 
     Yevgenie Sverdlik, "TeleGeography Maps the World's Cloud Data Centers: The firm behind Submarine Cable Map outlines geography of the Cloud," Data Center Frontier, 4 August 2020, https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/cloud/telegeography-maps-world-s-cloud-data-centers