From what I remeber there were a few steps to this being rendered, the first part was a massive particle sim. I was a systems engineer, so my job was to keep the system running.
That particle sim ate at least 7, if not more hard disks. What ever it did, it destroyed 8tb HDDs. The worst part was we couldn't take that file server offline, as the render needed to finish. But, not only was the render hammering and eating disks, the raid array was desperatly trying to rebuild the groups at the same time.
As soon as the group was rebuilt, another disk would fail.
so much joy. As soon as we had some slack, we migrated away from that server and gave something less stressful to do.
If someone told me that in order to take a picture of some natural landscape, I'd have to throw 7 brand new 8TB hard drives in the garbage, in order to capture a 64 megapixel image, I'd say "not worth it."
It challenges one's natural disinclination towards waste. I think that's a pretty normal gut response. Gifted with an a priori awareness of certainty of return on investment, it makes sense dive in, get knee deep, ignore the intuition that wells up around thoughts of sunk cost fallacies, and push through the hard parts. But when you're not a fortune teller, that risk aversion tends to help, more than harm.
But, you know, maybe that's the kind of thing that separates people like me from true success.
It sounds both incredibly interesting and a little frightening. I'd hate to think of the kinds of metrics that might be applied to professional programmers.
This takes the conceptual hazard to another level.
The way it goes down, in order to habituate a mob is to wait for a generation to grow up, having no memory of ever living another way.
Then the real exploitation begins.
So, as with environmental pollution, it's not really our problem, but 20 or 30 years from now? Forget it. Those lives are already ruined.