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Planetary Scale Information Transmission in the Biosphere and Technosphere: Limits and Evolution
- Source :
- Life, Vol. 13, No. 9, 1850 (2023)
- Publication Year :
- 2023
-
Abstract
- Information transmission via communication between agents is ubiquitous on Earth, and is a vital facet of living systems. In this paper, we aim to quantify this rate of information transmission associated with Earth's biosphere and technosphere (i.e., a measure of global information flow) by means of a heuristic order-of-magnitude model. By adopting ostensibly conservative values for the salient parameters, we estimate that the global information transmission rate for the biosphere might be $\sim 10^{24}$ bits/s, and that it may perhaps exceed the corresponding rate for the current technosphere by $\sim 9$ orders of magnitude. However, under the equivocal assumption of sustained exponential growth, we find that information transmission in the technosphere can potentially surpass that of the biosphere $\sim 90$ years in the future, reflecting its increasing dominance.<br />Comment: Published in Life; 14 pages; 1 figure
Details
- Database :
- arXiv
- Journal :
- Life, Vol. 13, No. 9, 1850 (2023)
- Publication Type :
- Report
- Accession number :
- edsarx.2309.07922
- Document Type :
- Working Paper
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.3390/life13091850