Digital content is on track to equal half of the Earth’s mass by 2245, according to new research.
The research by Dr Melvin Vopson, a former lecturer at the University of Portsmouth’s UK, highlights the physics of creating information and the requirements for storing large amounts of digital data.
“Assuming that the current growth of trends in digital content continues, the world will reach a singularity point in terms of the maximum possible digital information that has been made possible and the force must sustain it, called the catastrophe of information,” Vopson writes , in a paper published in AIP Advances, the journal of the American Institute of Physics.
The ‘information disaster’ will add to existing global challenges such as climate, environment, population, food, health, energy and security, according to the researcher.
The study examines the “incredible” growth of digital bits, the unit used to measure computer data. At the singularity point, more digital bits will be created than atoms on the planet. “At the same time, digital information production will only consume most of the planet’s power capacity,” Vopson writes.
With 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 , according to a press release about the investigation. Vopson says it would take about 130 years for the power needed to create digital information to equal all the power currently being produced on our planet. By 2245, the study says, half of the Earth’s mass would be digital information mass.
“In the extreme scenario, if our digital information production growth continues at 50% per year, by the year 2070, we will have 1 kg of digital bit content stored on the planet in all traditional and cloud data storage centers and endpoints such as PCs, smartphones and the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, ”the author explained in the research study. “Similarly, at 50% growth per year, by the year 2245, half of the planet’s mass will consist of digital bits.”
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