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.
The error is in the misconception of data and information being something accumulative. Information processing is a selective data-sifting process. Most data accumulated will never be used again after going once or maybe some more through this interpretive processing. It may pile up somewhere and slowly rot away. Call it “book-burning by nature” “the second law of thermodynamics” or whatever. It just happens. The big data companies of today are the hoarding idiots of tomorrow. What a relieve.
What about all the stuff that is erased, deleted, or overwritten?
Besides there is no proof Einstein’s equation is two way.
Just delete all the porn, we should be good for 5 or 6 hundred years after that ;0)
One simple consideration will pop this little balloon. It is not possible to determine wether a string of bits represent data or are random. You cannot make this distinction from the bits alone. You need to have knowledge of the encoding system that was used if at all.
This also means that all of the media that will ever be used to store data is already there, in whatever form.
So there is no trasnformation from something to datastorage medium going on.
Maybe fantasy writer Terry Pratchett has the answer.
How about this, from Terry Pratchett’s novel ‘Thief of Time’,
“For something to exist, it has to be observed.
For something to exist, it has to have a position in time and space.
And this explains why nine-tenths of the mass of the universe is unaccounted for.
Nine-tenths of the universe is the knowledge of the position and direction of everything in the other tenth. Every atom has its biography, every star its file, every chemical exchange its equivalent of the inspector with a clipboard. It is unaccounted for because it is doing the accounting for the rest of it, and you cannot see the back of your own head.”
Nine-tenths of the universe, in fact, is paperwork.”
http://www.chrisjoneswriting.com/thief-of-time.html
Heh heh
If you factor in the exponential deletion of truth or conservative thought, we can flatten the curve.
The gist the discussion seems to be that we have no idea what “information” is. Information has to have some sort of structure in order to encode the info. This means that it has lower entropy than the encoded info and that info is spontaneously degrading as entropy increases.
The brief quote from “Thief of time” may well be right. The “dark matter” in the universe is the “book keeping” records of what we don’t know about the universe (it is a he!! of a lot). It also begs the question about what dark matter is actually is and how it can interact with the “real” matter that we know.
We may have reached the limits already. Quite a few climate scientists agree that the climate on earth is so complex it would take a conventional computer greater than the size of the universe to calculate and predict the climate on earth.y
It’s not April 1st. Is this article from The Onion?