Planet Earth-Data

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

Ray Bradbury

 

 

Matter is extremely rare. And I say this by putting it in context, in the context that it belongs to: the absolute totality of time and space. Here and everywhere, now and always, the existence of matter is, has been and will be limited and scarce. Most of the Universe´s content (68%) is made out of a repulsive gravitational force: dark energy, then there is dark matter, it constitutes 27% of everything that exists. The remaining part is made by the grand total of all of the atoms, the so-called ordinary matter represents only 5% of the Universe. If we add: WASP-17 -one of the largest planets known by mankind–, the ten thousand billion ants live in this world, Rho Cassiopeiae –a star 300 thousand times brighter than the Sun and 450 times larger-, all of the existing plants, all of the shoes and all of the garbage, the 1,400 trillion litres of water that flow on this planet, all of the gases, all of the celestial bodies, all the mass and the non-mass forms of matter -such as light and electromagnetic radiation-, you and I, all the rest of the mankind: all of that is just a tiny ration of the universe, no more than a marginality, a pure ontological trifle.

 

And even within the smallness of the material sub-universe, it is an unusual privilege not to be hydrogen or helium. Apart from these two simple elements, there's so little of everything else: almost 90% of the total matter that exists in the Universe is hydrogen, half of the remaining 10% is helium. Furthermore, the total mass of the yellow tiny star that we orbit around is almost fully made of hydrogen (73%) and helium (25%), and the Solar mass represents 99.86% of the absolute mass of the solar system.

 

Some people believe that our planet should be called `Planet Water´instead of `Planet Earth´due to the immensity of our oceans and rivers, however, for every three million molecules on the planet, only one is water–, most of the mass is formed by iron (32%), oxygen (30%), silicon (15%), magnesium (14%) and small pieces of other elements, including carbon, an essential ingredient of living organisms.

 

On Earth, the entire biota is physical insignificance. The biosphere -the area where living beings can habit - is a very thin layer that covers the globe - "some birds fly at altitudes of up to 1,800 meters and certain fish live up to 8,370 meters underwater, not to mention the extremophiles arches and bacteria that live in deep levels of the crust" People / Territory: Humans in Space, Germán Castro) -, that barely reaches a weight of 600 billion tons.

 

Although you and I are a tiny part of the universe, we are both part of the species that drastically and quickly modified the whole planet´s environment, and this was done quite recently, humankind has been around for less than 100,000 years. It´s astonishing to realize how rare we are: we are matter, living matter, conscious and creative.

In a paper published in 2016, Jan Zalasiewicz (Scale and diversity of the physical technosphere: A geological perspective) propose the concept technosphere, to refer both to the people and social structures and to the physical infrastructure and technological devices that support the flows of energy, information and materials that enable the system to function. The term considers components of global scope, including active and inactive residuals, all of these components in constant growth, transformation and reincorporation.

They include "entities as diverse as power plants, transmission lines, roads, buildings, farms, plastics, tools, aeroplanes, pens, and transistors." Certainly, the technosphere interacts with some other spheres;" for example, humans, domesticated animals and plants, now constitute a big chunk of the biosphere and at the same time belong within the technosphere." According to early estimates, scientists conclude that the technosphere reaches a mass of approximately 30 million tons.

Twenty years ago, on The digital revolution, an approximation, an article I wrote for UAA´s (Universidad Autonoma de Aguascalientes) research journal Caleidoscopio, I reflected on the reach that digital revolution might have. Generalizing, I estimated that the digital revolution is “a revolution of conscience; for the first time in the history of mankind, due to new technology, the ways of processing material, ideas and emotions, and even perceptions and sensations are radically changing ”. The alteration of our notion of time and space is consequently shaping our reality... But that was an underestimation. The digital revolution is now also having a physical impact on a planetary scale.

A few days ago, Dr Melvin M. Vopson, a physicist from the English University of Portsmouth, published an astounding paper in AIP Advances magazine: The information catastrophe, where he shares a disconcerting perspective on the physical impact of the digital revolution. One of the alarming facts is that the rhythm of information production is swift and unstoppable and every day we rush to generate even more: 90% of the current data in the world has been created in the last 10 years. "Considering the current data storage density and the number of bits produced per year ... with an annual growth rate of 50%, in about 150 years the number of bits will equal the number of atoms on Earth."

The International Data Corporation estimates that the current data growth rate is 61%, and will surely accelerate. Furthermore, COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the process. "In approximately 130 years the energy required to maintain the creation of digital information will equal all the energy currently produced on planet Earth." Vopson, like other researchers, defends the idea that information is the fifth state of matter, cause it sets free heat when erased. According to their hypothesis the mass that a bit has. If their calculations are correct, around the year 2245, half of the Earth's mass would become a mass of digital information. Then maybe the planet Earth could use a name change.