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Concept Frontier

How plugging in USB cables efficiently can change the world

10/10/2014

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Here's a quantification exercise I did for fun regarding the invention of the bi-directional USB 
Picture
I plug a USB drive into a port, on average, 1.1 times a day. 

It takes me about 5 seconds to do it. And about 70% of the time I have to flip the plug over at least once because either I've got it the wrong way up, or I think I've got it the wrong way up and then flip it over to actually get it wrong, before I get it right. 

To plug it in correctly the first time takes 2 seconds. 

Which means that in a year, I plug in a USB 401.5 times, and spend 33.5 minutes plugging USB devices into USB-compatible devices. 
If all my USB plugs were made with the bi-directional model, that becomes 13.4 minutes per year: a saving of 20.1 minutes of my life between birthdays. A definite personal saving. 

Projecting that as a proposed average, and using the known population of the world (7,180,000,000 according to Wikipedia) who are over the age of 15 (73.9% of the big figure according to http://www.geohive.com/earth/population_age_1.aspx) as a multiplier, and we're looking at 5,306,020,000 people across all of whom -- once the bi-directional USB model is applied to all all relevant devices -- a saving of 202,912.9 years of human activity, per year, simply by no longer fussing about inefficiently when plugging in a USB cable. 
Over 200,000 years of human activity recovered per year
If we could cram that 202,912 years of human activity into a single year of concentrated effort (as statistically speaking we already can and do) we could spend it reversing the ecological damage of the industrial age, terraforming mars, building robot cars, or even just inventing new efficiencies in everyday objects to compound the time reclaimed from mundane tasks like plugging cables into electronic devices. 

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    Concept Frontier's mission is to optimise the three ways humanity uses information:
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