Digital content on its way to equal half of Earth’s mass by 2245

While we use resources, such as coal, oil, natural gas, copper, silicon, and aluminum, to support powerful computer farms and process digital information, our technological advances have divided the earth’s business from physical atoms to digital information – the fifth state of ‘ the matter, in addition to liquid, solid, gas and plasma.

Finally, we will reach a point of complete saturation, a period in our evolution in which digital bits will count atoms on Earth, a world “most computer simulated and dominated by digital bits and computer code,” according to an article published in AIP Advances.

It’s just a matter of time.

“We’re literally changing the planet for bit, and it’s an invisible crisis,” said author Melvin Vopson.

Vopson explores the factors driving this digital evolution. He said that the impressive limit on the number of bits, the energy to produce them, and the distribution of physical and digital mass will soon overwhelm the planet.

For example, using current data storage density, the number of bits produced per year and the size of a bit compared to the size of an atom, at a rate of 50% annual growth, the number of bits would be equal to the number of atoms on Earth in about 150 years.

It would take about 130 years for the power needed to create digital information to equal all the power currently produced on planet Earth, and by 2245 it would become half the mass of Earth. converted to digital information mass.

“The growth of digital information seems really unstoppable,” Vopson said. “According to IBM and other big data research sources, 90% of the world’s data has been created today in the last 10 years alone. Somehow the current COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this process, because more digital content is being used and produced than ever before. “

Vopson makes use of mass energy equivalence in Einstein’s theory of general relativity; the work of Rolf Landauer, who applies the laws of thermodynamics to information; and the work of Claude Shannon, the inventor of the digital bit.

In 2019, Vopson formulated a principle that postulates that information moves between states of mass and energy just like any other matter.

“The mass energy information equivalence principle builds on these concepts and opens up an enormous range of new physics, especially in cosmology,” he said. “If one brings information content into existing physical theories, then it’s almost like an extra dimension to everything in physics.”