The information catastrophe

This looks like a masterpiece of static analysis. You can make any number ludicrously big if you slap a 20% annual growth rate on it and then assume it'll keep going at that rate for hundreds of years.

Real life follows logistic curves, not exponential curves. Things grow exponentially-ish and then plateau as they run out of room.

Also, at her current growth rate, my 3 year old child will be 400 feet tall, 100 feet wide and weigh 150 metric tons by the time the article will come true - all results of a very scientific extrapolation that I did using math and stuff.

This is the same guy who reckons dark matter may be down to "information-mass".

Apparently he says you can prove information has mass by weighing a hard drive and measuring the difference when it's "full" and "empty".

https://www.technology.org/2020/01/24/physicist-proposes-a-t...

https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5123794

That paper is referenced in the one in the OP.

This is an actual physicist working for an actual university.

I imagine in 350 years, future-humans will get tired of seeing all the garbage bits polluting the sky and begin a coordinated effort to obtain a pirated version of WinRAR for each woman, man, and child. Global compression day will help delay information catastrophe for at least another 500 years.

Just reading the abstract is enough to realize that this article is just a huge pile of garbages.

What I'm thinking is that it is a student of a third world university that was forced to publish whatever bullshit to get his PhD title.

What is more annoying is that such stupid content could be considered as is by idiot politicians or ecologists to support any point against digital.

My bank account went up £3000 in one day, the day before I got £0. That's a growth rate of infinity percen, I'm a bit worried how the universe is going to accommodate this growth rate.

Is it maybe sarcastic, meant to satirize various other crises that people write about? My first reaction would be it's at least 50-50 this person thinks AGW is fake news.

It's a fun thought experiment, but our annual information output will not keep growing exponentially, it will saturate at some point, I suspect long before 350 years.

Wow, with all that information generated you would think some of it would tell us how to move off the planet and use more of the universe.

Is this is a real paper? https://xkcd.com/605/

This article is ridiculous. He didn't consider the advances in compression. In 6000 years humanity will have solved fractal compression to a level where we can store all the bits of the universe on a 1.44meg floppy disk.

What a rookie.

/s

If people can publish completely nonsensical predictions like this with a straight face, what does that say about similarly derived predictions on other topics, such as population growth?

The fundamental assumption here seems to be that we'll have no innovation in the technology (say, qubits) used to manage and create this information. I think that's flawed from the get-go.