Elementary school science teaches us that there are four types of matter: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. But a new theoretical study says that the fifth form of case is right under our noses and has the potential to cause a global crisis if unabated.
No, no element and no young woman named Leeloo. This proposed fifth form is information.
In a new study, researcher Melvin Vopson predicted that the weight of this information could be equal to half the Earth by the year 2245, thus creating what the study calls a “information disaster. “
But before we cower in the face of this new monolingualism, there are a few important caveats to consider.
In the findings, published Tuesday in the journal AIP Advances, Vopson, a senior lecturer in physics at the University of Portsmouth, turns to a thermodynamics principle proposed by physicist Rolf Landauer in 1961 to explain the relationship between bits – the smallest pieces of information that make up everything from how we send texts to how quantum computers are coded – and energy.
In a neutral, Landauer suggested that destroying a bit of information requires a similar dissipation of energy. With this principle in mind, it is reasonable to assume that creating and destroying more and more bits of information would require the use of more and more energy.
And this is exactly the problem, Vopson says.
“The growth of digital information seems really unstoppable,” Vopson explained. “According to IBM and other big data research sources, 90 percent 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. “
Calculating the total mass of information – According to IBM, we collectively collect 2.5 billion gigabytes of information every day on Earth, and because each byte consists of eight bits, this equates to 2 x 10 ^ 19 bits. For a whole year this is equivalent to 7.3 sextillion bits.
That’s a lot of information. Vopson states that the creation of this much data is only expected to increase in the coming decades and centuries, as our lives become increasingly digital. The question is whether we can maintain this influx or not.
With estimated growth rates per year of 5 percent, 20 percent, and 50 percent, Vopson estimates that the total number of generated bits could match the total number of atoms on Earth as soon as 2170. And in less time, just 130 years, Vopson estimates that energy requirements for information will only be equivalent to the total energy consumption on Earth today, which includes industrial, transportation and domestic energy.
“It’s almost like a extra dimension to everything in physics. “
This problem goes beyond energy, Vopson says. He also postulates that information can move between states of mass and energy just like any other type of matter. If this assumption is true, then it could mean that the hefty amount of energy required to produce this data could also be equal to mass – in fact, Vopson estimates that information is only half of the total mass of the Earth could appear by 2245.
But, there is a catch. These assumptions were and have been proposed in 2019 by Vopson himself still experimentally confirmed.
Vopson tells Inverse he is still optimistic that it will be proven correct on the basis of the scientific theories from which he draws.
“Since both special relativity and Landauer’s principle have been proven correct, it is very plausible that the new principle is also proven correct, even though it’s just a theory at the moment,” says Vopson.
And should this principle be confirmed, Vopson says it could have enormous implications for the study of physics, in particular cosmology.
“The principle of mass energy information equivalence builds on these concepts and opens up an enormous range of new physics, especially in cosmology,” he explains. “If one brings information content into existing physical theories, then it’s almost like an extra dimension to everything in physics.”
To preserve all this data, Vopson says that technology needs to be developed beyond the simple magnetic or optical hard disks we have today. Instead, it could be stored on non-physical entities such as photons.
So, are we in trouble? – Vopson’s paper does not touch much on what this energy saturation would mean for the end of the day – or how we can prevent it. Yet he tells Inverse that this new monolingualism is not necessarily a bad thing. Instead, it could represent a new form of evolution toward a transhumanist future.
“We are literally changing the planet bit-by-bit,” Vopson says. “This is the invisible crisis, because the effects are not yet visible.”
Abstract: At present, we annually produce ~ 1021 digital bits of information about Earth. Assuming 20% annual growth rate, we estimate that after ~ 350 years from now the number of bits produced will exceed the number of all atoms on Earth, ~ 1050. After ~ 300 years, the power required to make this digital production to be more than 18.5 1015 Watt, or total planetary energy consumption today, and after ~ 500 years from now, digital content will consume more than half of the earth’s mass, according to the principle of mass energy information equivalence. In addition to the existing global challenges such as climate, environment, population, food, health, energy and security, our estimates here point to another event for singularity for our planet, called the information disaster.
