I remember the same claim being made about Kim Kardashian’s butt.
I hope all those quintillion’s of digital bits are recyclable. Otherwise they will swamp us, far more so than rising seas.
Oh noes! Earth is becoming a Collyer’s Mansion! Data will crush us all, right before the additional weight pulls the moon down on us!
Well, then let’s save Earth’s space by posting the article here, and not clicking on this dude’s clickbait blog, since he didn’t even write the article.
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Digital content on track to equal half Earth’s mass by 2245
Charles Rotter / 39 mins ago August 16, 2020
If verified, the mass-energy-information equivalence principle will show that information is a physical, dominant, fifth state of matter, and digital bits will outnumber atoms on Earth — it’s just a matter of time.
AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS
IMAGE
IMAGE: VOPSON WANTS TO EXPERIMENTALLY VERIFY THAT INFORMATION BITS HAVE MASS, WHICH HE EXTRAPOLATED TO FORECAST IN 225 YEARS WILL BE HALF OF EARTH’S MASS. view more CREDIT: IMAGE COURTESY OF MELVIN VOPSON
WASHINGTON, August 11, 2020 — As we use resources, such as coal, oil, natural gas, copper, silicon and aluminum, to power massive computer farms and process digital information, our technological progress is redistributing Earth’s matter from physical atoms to digital information — the fifth state of matter, alongside liquid, solid, gas and plasma.
Eventually, we will reach a point of full saturation, a period in our evolution in which digital bits will outnumber atoms on Earth, a world “mostly computer simulated and dominated by digital bits and computer code,” according to an article published in AIP Advances, by AIP Publishing.
It is just a matter of time.
“We are literally changing the planet bit by bit, and it is an invisible crisis,” author Melvin Vopson said.
Vopson examines the factors driving this digital evolution. He said the impending limit on the number of bits, the energy to produce them, and the distribution of physical and digital mass will overwhelm the planet soon.
For example, using current data storage densities, 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 equal the number of atoms on Earth in approximately 150 years.
It would be approximately 130 years until the power needed to sustain digital information creation would equal all the power currently produced on planet Earth, and by 2245, half of Earth’s mass would be converted to digital information mass.
“The growth of digital information seems truly unstoppable,” Vopson said. “According to IBM and other big data research sources, 90% of the world’s data today has been created in the last 10 years alone. In some ways, the current COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this process as more digital content is used and produced than ever before.”
Vopson draws on the mass-energy equivalence in Einstein’s theory of general relativity; the work of Rolf Landauer, who applied 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 other matter.
“The mass-energy-information equivalence principle builds on these concepts and opens up a huge range of new physics, especially in cosmology,” he said. “When one brings information content into existing physical theories, it is almost like an extra dimension to everything in physics.”
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The article, “The information catastrophe,” is authored by Melvin M. Vopson. The article will appear in AIP Advances on Aug. 11, 2020 (DOI: 10.1063/5.0019941). After that date, it can be accessed at https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0019941.ABOUT THE JOURNAL
AIP Advances is an open access journal publishing in all areas of physical sciences–applied, theoretical, and experimental. The inclusive scope of AIP Advances makes it an essential outlet for scientists across the physical sciences. See https://aip.scitation.org/journal/adv.
From EurekAlert!
They should start running pkzip now.
Wow, man... like, cosmic.
Easily handled by banning cat videos.
And 90% of it is porn.
We better start building cloud server farms on Mars.
Digital trash will become a problem.
There is a great deal, and rapidly increasing, amount of data which is kept but will never be viewed again. Cloud computing providers will spend increasing resources on maintaining easy access to customer data which won’t be deleted and won’t be used.
Email. Photos. Video. Etc. Kept, maintained, backed up, optimized, ...
... and few will notice when it disappears.
Physically impossible. It takes bunch of atoms to store a bit of information. I am sure it will take less of them in the future, but I cannot see any way to store more than bit in the atom!
The Cloud will be so heavy it will be raining bits or will solidify like ice.
RSA public key encryption is based on the computational non-feasibility of factoring composite numbers which are the product of two large* prime numbers. A 4096 bit RSA key would be the product of two 2048 bit prime numbers. If one could store a table of all 2048 bit prime numbers using one subatomic particle per bit, it would require all of the particles in the observable universe times 10 raised to the 548th power!
*Large is a relative concept. The largest number that you can express is still one of the smallest numbers there is. There are an infinite number of larger numbers.
“digital bits will outnumber atoms on Earth”
The Dumbing Down of America, on display.
I read last year that the weight of the present digital mass approximates the weight of one strawberry, for what it is worth.
More techy leftist BS- it’s virtual dude.
*ping*
If Man is still alive.
Philosophical question: Can the number of digital bits ever be more than the number of electrons in the universe?