Wow, that's a bit insane.
15/8/20 00:43![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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talkpoliticsPREDICTED 'INFORMATION CATASTROPHE' MAY BE CAUSED BY FIFTH STATE OF MATTER
Yeah, this article is a mess. The start is telling:
"ELEMENTARY SCHOOL SCIENCE TEACHES US THAT THERE ARE FOUR TYPES OF MATTER: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. But a new theoretical study says that a fifth element has been lurking right under our noses and has the potential to cause a worldwide crisis if left unabated."
"No, it's not a young woman named Leeloo. This proposed fifth element is information"
Types - states - elements(?) of matter all mixed up.
The point that information processing requires energy, sure, and extrapolating our current trends, sure, we'd need enormous amounts of energy. Energy mass equivalence, sure. But this is meaningless extrapolation so far.
My favorite part is at the end when they refer to photons as 'non-physical entities."
Elementary school teaches us about solids, liquids, and gasses, but there already is a "fifth" state of matter. Bose-Einstein condensate.
"With estimated growth rates per year of 5 percent, 20 percent, and 50 percent, Vopson estimates that the total number of bits created could match the total number of atoms on Earth as soon as 2170."
This is what happens if you predict exponential growth to continue on indefinitely. You will make unreasonable predictions since the pattern won't continue forever. At some point limits will be hit. If we predicted the pandemic to continue spreading by the same percentage of growth every day, by 2050 everyone will have been infected billions of times and trillions of people will be dead. That isn't going to be the result though. There are some hard limits that will be hit before that.
Same with that old prediction that at some point the global population would be so huge that people would be standing on top of each other's head.
Electronic data does have mass in the form of electrons stored on SSDs, but it is much less mass than the same amount of data being stored on dead trees.
Conflagrating digital data with the concept of information in physics is the root of this logical error. Digital data is much easier to overwrite that information in physics. It requires no more energy cost than the first time data is inscribed on the storage medium.
Altering digital data is a simple matter of breaking the pointer, which references the space as "empty" regardless of the size of the space.
In physics, information is details like quantum spin. Changing physical systems in the orders of magnitude that we change digital data would require logarithmic levels of energy.
Also, the fact the the scientist questioned in this article uses the phrase "just a theory" to refer to an untested hypothesis is very vexing.
He's in a blind hole for sure, but I think he knows it and was just throwing up an idea to get discussion going. Then an editor grabbed it and figured he'd generate some clicks. And there we are, OMGZ INFORMATION SINGULARITY!
Yeah, this article is a mess. The start is telling:
"ELEMENTARY SCHOOL SCIENCE TEACHES US THAT THERE ARE FOUR TYPES OF MATTER: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. But a new theoretical study says that a fifth element has been lurking right under our noses and has the potential to cause a worldwide crisis if left unabated."
"No, it's not a young woman named Leeloo. This proposed fifth element is information"
Types - states - elements(?) of matter all mixed up.
The point that information processing requires energy, sure, and extrapolating our current trends, sure, we'd need enormous amounts of energy. Energy mass equivalence, sure. But this is meaningless extrapolation so far.
My favorite part is at the end when they refer to photons as 'non-physical entities."
Elementary school teaches us about solids, liquids, and gasses, but there already is a "fifth" state of matter. Bose-Einstein condensate.
"With estimated growth rates per year of 5 percent, 20 percent, and 50 percent, Vopson estimates that the total number of bits created could match the total number of atoms on Earth as soon as 2170."
This is what happens if you predict exponential growth to continue on indefinitely. You will make unreasonable predictions since the pattern won't continue forever. At some point limits will be hit. If we predicted the pandemic to continue spreading by the same percentage of growth every day, by 2050 everyone will have been infected billions of times and trillions of people will be dead. That isn't going to be the result though. There are some hard limits that will be hit before that.
Same with that old prediction that at some point the global population would be so huge that people would be standing on top of each other's head.
Electronic data does have mass in the form of electrons stored on SSDs, but it is much less mass than the same amount of data being stored on dead trees.
Conflagrating digital data with the concept of information in physics is the root of this logical error. Digital data is much easier to overwrite that information in physics. It requires no more energy cost than the first time data is inscribed on the storage medium.
Altering digital data is a simple matter of breaking the pointer, which references the space as "empty" regardless of the size of the space.
In physics, information is details like quantum spin. Changing physical systems in the orders of magnitude that we change digital data would require logarithmic levels of energy.
Also, the fact the the scientist questioned in this article uses the phrase "just a theory" to refer to an untested hypothesis is very vexing.
He's in a blind hole for sure, but I think he knows it and was just throwing up an idea to get discussion going. Then an editor grabbed it and figured he'd generate some clicks. And there we are, OMGZ INFORMATION SINGULARITY!
(no subject)
Date: 14/8/20 17:49 (UTC)That said calling information an element smacks more of the ol' Earth-Water-Fire-Air-Aether variant with Information a much less esoteric-sounding equivalent of the Aether. Of course since creationism and other medieval-esque conspiracy theories are treated as legitimate alternatives, well....
(no subject)
Date: 14/8/20 20:11 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 14/8/20 20:18 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 14/8/20 23:50 (UTC)