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
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.
In 1905 everyone believed New Your would by buried in horse manure within a short time. This scare has now morphed into death by digits. I’m really, really scared now. Really.
Ha ha I just posted nearly that same thing because Word Press or whatever slows WUWT comments down to a crawl showed no comments two minutes ago.
There is one digit I could extend to show what I think of this idea.
Richard
Decimal “4” if one uses the fingers of their hand as powers-of-two place holders.
Now see! Why you got to complicate thangs! Thangs get complicated enough without you helpin’. Dag nab-it!
2hotel9
Four! 🙂
Vopson has failed to account for anti-information, which in the case of the internet far outweighs the mass of information.
I liked that, …… the mass of anti-information being provided by the internet and the liberal lefty MSM will always far outweighs the mass of factual information.
Twitter alone cancels out all of the positive information accumulated since the beginning of history.
He also failed to account for the fact that storing information requires at least 1 atom per bit. Even the densest SSD’s require 1000’s of atoms per stored bit and that’s just for microns thick active layer of the silicon. Add packaging, power supplies, etc. and we’re up to trillions of atoms per bit. Big numbers seem to abstract for the author to grok the differences between them. As a math professor of mine once said “There’s an infinite infinitude of infinities”.
CO2…
You said, “… storing information requires at least 1 atom per bit.” I thought about that for a moment and initially came to the same conclusion. However, if one uses just the outer electrons of a large atom, i.e. the valence state, then a single atom of carbon could hold nominally 8 bits of information. That could be increased by using electron spin to code the number of bits.
Carbon has 4 valence electrons. The other 4 are shared with other carbon atoms. The problem would be differentiating between the different electrons. While we think of the electrons in each shell as being discrete. Once electrons are in a shell, you really can’t distinguish between them.
You could perhaps use different energized states of a molecule like CO2 to distinguish bits, but the higher the energy of these states, the more volatile it becomes and owing to spontaneous emissions relaxing it to lower states, it would need to be refreshed at a very high rate to insure against data loss. As soon as the power goes away, so do the stored bits.
“Carbon has 4 valence electrons. The other 4 are shared with other carbon atoms.”
Starting with your send sentence, what you are saying here is in several instances wrong or confusing as to what you are trying to communiicate.
For those who may be reading who do not have much or any background in these subjects (chemistry and atomic physics), I want to give some general info:
Hold on a second there…you seem to be implying that a carbon atom has 8 electrons.
Carbon in the neutral state has only six electrons.
Two are in the innermost “shell”, and are not ordinarily considered available for chemical interactions…they are shielded by the second shell.
The innermost electron shell is called the K shell.
It can hold at most two electrons.
Next is the L shell, which can hold as many as 8 electrons.
Carbon has four in this shell.
The outermost shell in an atom is what is called the “valence shell”.
The electrons in this shell are called the valence electrons.
The term orbital is itself was coined as a sort of shorthand, by Robert Mulliken, short for “one-electron orbital wave function”.
In molecular orbital theory, electrons in a molecule are shared between atoms, and form covalent bonds by forming pairs of electrons.
The most energetically stable form for an atom or molecule is to have the outermost shell, the valence shell, filled.
This theory does a very good job of explaining the propensity of atoms to form molecules with other atoms, as well as the properties of those molecules.
It explains which atoms can form bonds with other atoms, how readily it can do so, and with how many other atoms it can form a bond with.
So carbon has four electrons in it’s valence shell, with space for four more, so it can readily bond with as many as four valence electrons from other atoms.
Also very important is the concept of electronegativity, which is partly a function of the ability of the electrons in at atom (or molecule) to “shield” the positive charge in the nucleus.
Full valence shells shield the nucleus the most effectively.
Larger atoms have a larger positive charge to be shielded, and so electronegativity tends to decrease is one descends down the periodic table.
The periodic table itself is arranged the way it is because of electron shells and how they are filled.
Electronegativity increases as a valence shell is filled, but decreases for atoms (and molecules) with full shells
Basically, electronegativity is a measure of the propensity for an atom to be able to form bonds, and how strong those bonds will be. The higher the electronegativity is, the more able an atomic (or molecular) species is to “grab” electrons from other atoms and this form a bond.
Highly electronegative atoms and molecules can grab electrons, and thus the atoms they are associated with, away from atoms and molecules that are less electronegative.
Species with full valence shells are the most stable, and the least electronegative, and thus hardest to disrupt, and hence the least reactive.
Electronegativity is closely correlated with atomic radius. As this radius decreases, the ionization energy of that species increases, and so does electronegativity.
Also, note that shells and orbitals do not coincide as one progresses to heavier atoms.
There are “subshells” as well, as can be seen by noting that the 3rd period atoms number 8, while the third shell can hold 18 electrons.
Anyway, before going off on too much of a tangent, I wanted to point out that the four valence electrons in carbon ARE the ones which are or can be shared to form bonds with other atoms in a molecule.
The valence electrons can form bonds with other atoms, not just carbon.
I am not going to comment on the latter parts of your comment, because I do not know what you are trying to say, but most of it seems to not make a ton of sense to me.
Just sayin’.
Nicholas,
An electron shared between atoms could represent at most 1 bit, not 1 bit per atom it’s shared among. Carbon is also a semiconductor, so it’s outer electrons are not bound to specific atoms anyway, so a different element needs to be identified as the potential storage atom. An inert gas might be a better choice, but that brings up a whole other set of issues.
DNA is as dense as nature has found for storing information by organizing atoms and this is a lot less than 1 bit per atom, especially when considering redundancy. Relative to atoms per bit of storage, modern SSD chips are already within striking range of DNA. What they’re doing now to increase the capacities of SSD’s is to stack multiple storage cells on top of each other on the same chip.
Right theory but the problem is you need to somehow hold the atom orientation and the electric field is much more difficult to interact with at the atomic level. That is why when IBM did the demonstration of 1 bit per atom storage in 2017 they used the magnetic field.
Clyde, there is this:
“In condensed matter physics, a Cooper pair or BCS pair is a pair of electrons (or other fermions) bound together at low temperatures in a certain manner first described in 1956 by American physicist Leon Cooper. Cooper showed that an arbitrarily small attraction between electrons in a metal can cause a paired state of electrons to have a lower energy than the Fermi energy, which implies that the pair is bound. In conventional superconductors, this attraction is due to the electron–phonon interaction. The Cooper pair state is responsible for superconductivity, as described in the BCS theory developed by John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and John Schrieffer for which they shared the 1972 Nobel Prize . . . Electrons have spin of ± 1⁄2, so they are fermions, but the total spin of a Cooper pair is integer (0 or 1) so it is a composite boson.”—source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_pair
Therefore, it appears that a superconducting material could (theoretically) have its free electrons that exist as Cooper pairs (composite bosons) “programmed” to be in either the stable total spin “0” state or the stable total spin “1” state.
I will leave it to you as to how best to do the “writing” of information into this superconducting information storage system, and likewise how best to do the “reading” of such stored information.
Yes, we can share the patent, the royalties, and resulting Nobel prize for this invention.
I’m sure there’s something raysis in there, just can’t figure out what.
I’m not ready to do the patent thing again. I was just trying to point out that there may be ways to encode information at higher densities than 1 bit per atom (presence or absence of an atom). The Devil is always in the details.
Everything from Pythagoras on down is raciss.
By the time we get to Newton, it is pert near white supremacy, nearin as I kin figure.
“…science must be “done away with entirely” and “start over again.”
https://youtu.be/C9SiRNibD14
After all, it completely fails to explain witchcraft, and such practices as smiting one’s enemies by calling down a lightning bolt.
Jeff,
Decolonize your mind!
Brutha.
“Therefore, it appears that a superconducting material could (theoretically) have its free electrons that exist as Cooper pairs (composite bosons) “programmed” to be in either the stable total spin “0” state or the stable total spin “1” state.”
Be all that as it may, the question raised by Clyde becomes a question of how exactly one can create and maintain the state of such information, for example how to create the superconducting temperatures, magnetic fields, etc, to say nothing of the means of storing and retrieving any information contained therein?
IOW…besides for the strictly logical and theoretical question, is there any conceivable practical basis for supposing we can store more bits of information than we have atoms with which to create the means to store them?
I think at some point, someone may have to break it to Vopson that he is not as smart or as thoughtful as he apparently considers himself to be.
At the very least, he appears oblivious to this thing called entropy.
Nicholas, the point is that if we can access electrons that exist in the unfilled valence band(s) of metals—perhaps even the electrons in the filled valence bands for superconducting metals—each Cooper pair of those may be able to store one bit of information. If we at looked at Group 14 elements in the Periodic Table, there is the metal lead (Pb) with 82 electrons, four of which are in the valence band. Lead has one of the highest temperatures for an elemental metal transitioning to a superconducting state, 7.2 K.
So, for at least this example, a single lead atom could theoretically store two bits of information assuming the use of Cooper pairs available from its unfilled valence band.
Clyde, the avg specific gravity of the earth is close to that of germanium ~5.3. 50% of the mass of the earths crust is oxygen and of the the whole earth is 37%. 98% of the crust are common elements (Si, Al, Fe, Mg, Ca, K, Na and all the rest are in the 2% remaining), the heaviest element in this tally is iron making up 5%. Fe, O, Si, and Mg make up 93% of the whole earth.
We won’t have available in quantity and price the heavier elements to manufacture our bits.
This goofy idea has to come from a professor. I loved my professors, Bless their hearts, but truly thank God for engineers and economic geologists which, in a realistic world the latter would be considered part of the engineering field. The availability of the earth’s mass to convert to bits mass isnt exploitable. And what about the real mass that is proton and neutrons. QED.
Note also that he sees this as a crisis! So far there is no sign that humankind essentially is a crisis manufacturing creature. We are problem solvers. We have quadrupled our lifespan in a couple of centuries. We are erasing poverty at an accelerating rate, greening the planet for our fellow other creatures, travelling to the stars, … That this precious physicist can even contemplate such nonsense wouldn’t have been possible a generation ago. Is he our first Malthusian physicist?
Compression, in many cases, greatly reduces the number of storage bit. This may be to zero loss of information, to noticeable loss, or to loss that is undetectable for the intended use of the information.
Storage, in general, requires no energy to maintain, only to created or access.
This reminds me of the sci-fi story (can’t remember the title) where invading aliens come to earth; quickly gather all the information ever generated on this earth; and record all that information as one mark on their continuous analog unit stick, whose digits in the decimal expansion of its offset from zero encoded all that information. Then they destroyed the earth and went on to do the same at the next inhabited planet — or something like that.
That reminds me of another sci-fi story where the protagonists on a starship need to encode information compactly for radio transmission, so they write out the Gödel number of the message they want to send, then encode that number as a sum of a handful of carefully chosen integers raised to the power of other carefully chosen integers. The implication was that an arbitrarily complex message could be encoded with no more than a handful of medium-sized integers this way, and there seems to be something wrong with that, but I’m having a hard time figuring out what 🙂
I have found that just communicating directly works far better. “Hey motherf*cker! They are turning your left flank” See?
hey, what happens if anti information is brought into contact with information? Do the two annihilate each other with the release of ?????
The human capacity to invent new, never before heard-of “crises” seems to be growing beyond all bounds.
Only EurekAlert! could push crap like this.
So there IS a Planet B!
As a start to addressing this crisis, today I’m going through my laptop and start deleting files I don’t need.
I’ve noticed my hard drive gets more weighty as 0’s are changed to 1’s….eventually I used to have to buy a bigger hard drive, but now I just put those strings of 0’s and 1’s on “the cloud”, which means on someone else’s computer eventually gets heavier instead of mine.
/s
Do thoughts weigh heavy on a thinker?
…only if digitized!
If I look at the Thinker by Rodin I would say, yes thoughts weigh heavy on him 😀
Just my impression. Depends certainely on what he is thinking about 😀
Is he next to the Venus De Milo?
It looks like he’s thinking “where can I get prunes at this time of night?”
No doubt the guy’s an intellectual mask debater.
And New York should have been buried in horse manure by a decade or so ago. Didn’t happen.
Cuomo is striving mightily to remedy the deficit. Give him a few more months.
We will just build a planet composed of Memory Bits next to our own to compensate. As long as we’re dealing in futurist fairy tales like this one.
“If present trends continue…”
Maybe he should call his scenario e-RCP 8.5.
Some people should just accept they’re fiction writers.
Or dipshits
Or Bitshits.
Since that outcome is obviously absurd, something else will happen, and the projected outcome will no longer hold.
So, what is it that will happen to change the outcome?
Forgetting.
So, just another fake crisis to gin up another wave of hysteria. Got it. I actually thought this may have been something serious, oh well.
“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.”
So don’t have it on Earth, put it in Earth orbit- where there is unlimited access to electrical power.
Call it “The Final Encyclopedia”!!
(gratuitous sci-fi reference to Gordon Dickinson novel of that name, in which a massive complex in Earth orbit contained all of human knowledge.)
George V – Why are we worrying about all this information storage when we already know that the final answer to life, the universe and everything is 42.
The power needed to run a computer has been falling, even as the amount of memory in those computers has been rising.
You would make a terrible catastrophist!
gbaikie
You suggested, “put it in Earth orbit.”
So, instead of referring to is as the “Cloud” it could be called the “Or-bit.”
Uh oh. What if there are an unequal number of zeros and ones?
We cannot allow such an injustice to occur. Affirmative action for binary states.
This problem will only get worse, unless we convince our leaders to implement protctions using regulations and taxes. The models prove it.
The erased byte on media is usually 0xFF so a blank disk starts as all 1’s which would be the normal or privileged state. So zero would be the victim state so clearly we need a Zero State matters (ZSM) movement.
david g, are you really an advocate for BLM . . . as in, “Bit Lives Matter”?
Melvin’s mind is an afterbirth of a Mongolian gang bang.
We have conservation of mass. If we convert mass to energy, in theory we can convert it back to the same amount of mass.
So, the mass of the Earth and everything on it is pretty much constant. If solar energy is converted to mass, the effect is trivial. Cosmic dust doesn’t contribute much.
If half the mass of the Earth is data by 2045, that means half the Earth must be missing somewhere. Could it be converted to data?
The headline is ridiculous. I didn’t bother to read further.
WOOW, more scientific magic.
How many atoms to store a bit?
This is way beyond my pay grade but, they’re talking about using electron spin to store data. link Does that mean you could store more than one bit in an atom? I have no clue. I do suspect that, in terms of memory density at least, Moore’s law will live on for a very long time. ie. One bit per atom is a long way in the future.
One bit per atom was done by IBM in 2017
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3178339/ibm-fits-a-bit-on-an-atom-eyeing-ever-smaller-devices.html
Should add a proper qubit per atom was done last year again by IBM.
This is entirely wrong. Once socialism takes over, all historical information will be deleted. This has been shown in recent history, specifically in the Soviet Union. It is no different from the destroying of statues happening now. So the data buildup problem will never occur.
A as Nd with out the US as a counter balance the world will spiral in to a North Korea like waste land
Always the same. Nothing is going to change over the centuries to some people. Everything is zero sum set in stone.
Why am I reminded of this quote by Mark Twain:
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
Brought a true smile to my face.
Same here.
I just imgine the size of the cloud, full with data, turning around earth, maybe once darkening solar panels 😀
…seeded that heavily, wouldn’t the cloud begin to rain?
A raining data cloud, why not, s.th. new 😀
Has to be considerd in the future, as question of data security 😀
I have no doubt the study is correct, if one accepts the premise that all this information must be stored indefinitely. It obviously requires mass to manufacture the physical ability to store a bit of information. However, once the materials best able to store information, and the auxiliary materials to effect this manufacture, begin to diminish in supply, the cost to store will rise and put a damper on the party.
In the one million top priorities of worries, this one ranks about 999,999.
All of the data (and computers) I used from 1988 till about 10 years ago are gone.
Perhaps Prof Vopson meant it as a prank.
Gonna need a pretty good internet connection to download it all to my PC.
Obviously a prank. If there were to be as many bits stored on media than atoms of the earth, there would have to be a way of storing more than one bit per atom of the media (how?), or a way of storing data on simply everything on or in the earth.
You can encode multiple bits per atom you have electric and magnetic spins. The atomic storage of 1 bit per atom was done by IBM using only the magnetic spin.
The problem is you use magnetic direction to encode. The hint is a 0 state has a magnetic direction as does 1 and the choice is purely randomly assigned by the media and media reader. Even if you chose to encode the direction randomly it still has a state just meaningless to the magnetic reader.
My notifications of comments here have been mistaken for spam, so I’ve only just found them.
I wrote to Vopson asking if his paper was a prank and he replied that it wasn’t.
He’s asked me to do some reading.
If I define informaton in a crazy way … and I make stupid assumptions … then compound it by even more crazy assumptions … and then demand the government pay me a wage … then I too could prove anything I like and I too would be an academic.
Yep you got it in one he hasn’t got a clue what quantum information actually means.
The story and the comments ignore the real issue
Digital bits (e currency, the massive data farms required by tech like farcebook, twatter, google, Amazon, net flicks etc etc etc) are what are mainly driving increased power generation at least in the first world
And this cannot be intermittent and so is fossil fuel based regardless of greenwashing claims
The groups on the forefront of climate change blather are some of the biggest contributors of CO2, if that somehow turns out to be a problem
I say we combine those names and call the whole conglomeration as TwitGooFace.