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A new study warns of the danger of an information catastrophe that could occur around 2245, when half the planet’s mass could come from human-generated digital data, according to Agerpres. Additionally, some scientists have found a troubling link between the removal of a digital bit and the amount of heat produced.
According to a study published in the journal AIP Advances, and cited by Space.com, in two centuries, the total number of digital bits produced annually by humanity could exceed the number of atoms on our planet and, moreover, could represent half of the mass of the Earth.
Mobile phones and the extremely frequent use of social media have caused almost everyone on the planet to generate large amounts of digital content every day.
IBM and other technology research companies have estimated that 90% of today’s digital data around the world has been produced in the last decade alone., which led physicist Melvin Vopson of the University of Portsmouth, England, to question the future of humanity.
His analysis begins with the fact that Earth contains between 10 and 21 billion, or 100 trillion, bits of digital information. “It’s about everything we do together. Any digital content produced and stored anywhere on the planet, by anyone,” Vopson told Live Science.
Then he calculated how much digital data could exist in the future. This is not a simple linear extrapolation, because the volume of new information also increases with time.
Assuming a modest 20% annual increase in digital content, Vopson has shown that in 350 years the number of bits on Earth will be greater than that of all the atoms that make up Earth, an estimated 10 to 50 or 100 trillion trillions. trillions of trillions of atoms. Thus, in the future even closer than in three and a half centuries, humanity will come to use the equivalent of its current energy consumption just to sustain all these endless chains of 0’s and 1’s.
“The question is: where are we going to store this information? How are we going to supply power to it? I call this the invisible crisis, because today is really an invisible problem,” Vopson said.
Worrisome assumption: removing a digital bit produces a small amount of heat
If such time horizons seem far enough away to be completely ignored, Vopson cautions about another possible cause for concern. In 1961, the German-American physicist Rolf Landauer advanced the hypothesis that there is a connection between information and energy, starting from the fact that the erasure of a digital bit produces a small amount of heat.
Although this hypothesis of the link between information and energy, called the Landauer principle, is not yet part of the academic consensus, it has been confirmed experimentally in recent years. In a study published in 2019 in the journal AIP Advances, Vopson claimed that, implicitly, there could be a link between information and mass.
This conjecture is based on the famous equation E = mc ^ 2, introduced by Albert Einstein in the early 20th century. Einstein proved that energy and mass are interchangeable, and so Vopson was able to calculate the potential mass of a single bit of information, which is about 10 million times smaller than that of an electron.
This means, of course, that for the moment, the mass of digital information produced annually is negligible, as it has the weight of a single E. coli bacteria, according to Vopson. But if we assume that this 20% annual increase in the amount of digital information produced will be maintained, in less than 500 years the “weight” of existing digital information could be equal to half the mass of the Earth.
If that annual increase were 50%, half the weight of the planet would be represented by digital information by 2245 at the latest.
“I think it is a real problem. Like the burning of fossil fuels, plastic pollution and deforestation, digital information is being overlooked by everyone. We have started to literally change the planet little by little,” he said. The scientist.
Furthermore, the growth rate of the amount of digital information used by Vopson in his study is very conservative. Estimates from the International Data Corporation show that the amount of digital data is currently increasing by 61% per year (compared to 20% that Vopson uses in his calculations), conditions in which the computer catastrophe the scientist talks about could happen a lot Faster.
One way to address the challenges of storing extremely large amounts of digital information would be to develop technology that holds the information in a non-material environment, such as holograms, says Vopson.
The arguments of this study are surprising and challenging for the mind, says particle physicist Luis Herrera from the University of Salamanca (Spain), who was not involved in the study. But the idea that information has mass remains theoretical for now and will require more experiments to prove it, he added.
Editing: Alexandru Costea
