OK, look, right off the bat I’ll admit this really doesn’t have much to do with cars. I mean, it was inspired by something that happened in a car, and there’s some references to both air and space transportation here, but I’m not going to lie to you: it’s not really about cars. But, it is kind of interesting, and I made it, so, too bad, now you get to see it. We’ll get through this.
What inspired this was something that happened when I was doing the range test of the Changli. Because I have an advanced case of Being an Idiot, I picked up this old CRT TV from the side of the road, ostensibly to use with one of my old computers or consoles, but really because, as I said, I’m an idiot.
As I was lugging around that stupid, heavy-arse TV, I once again said a silent prayer to Buynewshittia, the goddess of technological progress, and thanked her for the development of LCD televisions, which are so incredibly smaller and lighter and better in nearly every way than old CRTs.
I mean, I still sort of love the look of CRTs, but holy shit were they bulky. Looking at this beast next to any of my other LCD screens got me wondering — just how much total space was saved in America with the widespread adoption of LCD televisions?
So I started looking up some numbers and doing a bit of maths. I was just focused on TV replacement, not computer monitors, which would make these numbers even bigger.
The goal was to know just how much volume that was once occupied by the bulky tubes and electronics of a CRT TV was freed up when those sets were replaced with flat screens across America. Here’s what I came up with:
Holy crap, right? As a nation, we’ve saved the equivalent of the total interior volumes (passenger and cargo) of 35,000 Boeing 747s, (which is way more than the 1,500 or so actually ever built) or seven and a half times the volume of one of the biggest (by area) buildings in the world, the NASA Vehicle Assembly Building, the place where NASA puts rockets together.
That’s a lot of space freed up, right? Too bad it’s all just cluttered up now with DVDs we never watch anymore.