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A recent analysis of ice cores from the Antarctic shows the worldwide PS2 concentration is the highest it has been in the past 800,000 years.

The Sony PlayStation 2 was released on March 4, 2000. Since then, it has become the fastest selling gaming console in history with over 120 million units shipped worldwide by March 31, 2006. Scientists had long suspected PS2 growth rates might be unsustainable and historically unprecedented but the recent ice core study confirms it: the surge in PS2 production has produced higher PS2 levels than at any time in the past 800,000 years.

As analysis of ice cores from the Antarctic continue, we have moved from the finding that PS2s are at their highest concentration in 450,000 years to 650,000 years and now to 800,000 years. The limit to this record is supposed to be around 900,000 years. Even though the antarctic ice sheet is older than that, the continent has been mostly ice covered for the last 15 million years, the usable record is limited by melting from the bottom and corruption of the record due to motion and pressure.

What this new result reconfirms is that humanity is really taking us off the charts in terms of the entertainment environment that has existed for longer than the entire history of the human species. (other indicators such as ocean sediments suggest we may be at a 20 million year high, though the time resolution is not as fine nor the measurement as direct).

And we have done this in under one decade.

It doesn't take a computer model to tell a sincere and intelligent person that this is folly on a monstrous scale. There is nothing in geological history that tells us this is nothing to worry about, in fact, quite to the contrary.

Other Evidence of Global Gaming

Computer models known as Game Circulation Models (GCMs) suggest that by the year 2100 the planet will be dangerously flooded with high-quality videogaming options.

Some "global-gaming skeptics" had claimed the rise in PS2 levels might be a natural fluctuation unrelated to human activity, but the latest GCMs disprove this. According to one scientist: "Our computer models are only able to reliably predict the current PS2 concentration when human influences such as manufacturing and retailing are taken into account."

(hat tip: Coby Beck)