To most people, information seems to be intangible. However, in just a few centuries, the total number of digital bits produced by humans each year will exceed the number of atoms on the earth; even more surprising is that this information may account for half of the mass of the earth. This incredible conclusion comes from a new study in which researchers observed the growth of data over time and proposed the disastrous consequences of this growth.
We live in an era of immensely rich information. The ubiquitous use of mobile phones and social media means that almost everyone is generating a staggering amount of computerized content every day .
According to estimates by other technology research companies such as IBM, 90% of the world’s digital data is generated in the past ten years, which prompted Melvin Watson, a physicist at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom, to start thinking about humans. The future direction of society.
Watson’s analysis is based on the fact that the earth currently contains approximately 10^21 bytes of computer information. “This was created by us together,” he said. “This includes digital content that everyone creates and stores anywhere on the planet.” After that, Wopson calculated how much data might appear in the future. This is not a simple linear inference, because the amount of new information is also increasing over time.
Watson pointed out that assuming that digital content grows at a rate of 20% per year, then 350 years later, the number of data bits on the earth will exceed the number of all atoms on the earth, and the total number of atoms on the earth is about 10 to the 50th power. Even before that, humans will use a huge amount of energy-possibly equivalent to the current energy consumption of the world-to maintain all these data composed of 0 and 1.
“The question is: Where do we store this information? How do we provide energy?” Wapson said, “I call this an invisible crisis, because as far as today is concerned, this is indeed an invisible problem.”
Although from the present point of view, the time scale of hundreds of years seems to be the distant future, but Wopson also warned that we may also worry about another important issue. In 1961, German-American physicist Rolf Landauer proposed the link between thermodynamics and information. He pointed out that erasing a digital bit generates a small amount of heat, so there is a connection between information and energy.
This theory is called Randall’s principle. Although it is still controversial in science, it has been confirmed by some experiments in recent years. In a study published in the journal AIP Advances in 2019, Wopson hypothesized that there might be a connection between information and quality. This conjecture relies on the famous mass-energy equation E = mc^2, which was derived by Albert Einstein in the early 20th century. Einstein’s work showed that energy and mass can be converted, which prompted Wopson to calculate the possible mass of a bit of information—about 10 million times less than the mass of an electron.
Watson said that this means that the amount of information currently generated every year is insignificant, even relative to the weight of a single E. coli. However, assuming that information grows at a rate of 20% every year, in less than 500 years, half of the earth’s mass will be converted into digital data.
Assuming that the growth rate of information is 50%, then by 2245, half of the earth’s mass will be information. Watson’s research results were published in the August 11th issue of “Progress in the American Physical Union”. “I think this is a very practical issue,” Wapson said. “Like burning fossil fuels, plastic pollution, and deforestation, I think everyone is neglecting information. We are doing it’bit by bit’. Change the earth.”
In fact, Watson believes that the information growth rate estimate in his paper is somewhat conservative—International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that the current data growth rate is 61%—and believes that this information disaster may be Happened earlier than expected. He pointed out that one of the ways to alleviate the problem of such a large amount of data storage may be to develop technology to store information in non-material media (such as holographic images).
Luis Herrera, a particle physicist at the University of Salamanca in Spain, was not involved in this work, but he said that the arguments presented in this study are thought-provoking and surprising. However, the view that information is of quality is still at the theoretical level and needs more experiments to prove it. At least Wopson himself is very confident in the theory. He said: “Since both the special theory of relativity and Randall’s principle have been confirmed, the possibility that this theory will eventually be confirmed is very high, although it is still only in theory. on.”
Herrera said that considering that “information disaster” involves a long time, and in reality, human beings are also facing other more pressing crises, “I think there are many more important issues than this.”
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