4 ms·
The information catastrophe
- kanobo 6y agoI 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.
- taneq 6y agoThis 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.
- camdenlock 6y ago> Huawei Technologies Sweden ...wut
- viksit 6y agoThe 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.
- hyko 6y agoIs this is a real paper? https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
- danw1979 6y agoI’m not sure why you’re getting downvoted for such a succinct appraisal of this paper...
- bryanrasmussen 6y agomaybe there are people who automatically downvote XKCD links without a lot of content? I recently posted one I thought was a succinct appraisal and got 4 downvotes for some reason - then again maybe I'm like Steve Martin in the Jerk shouting these guys must hate xkcd!
- quietbritishjim 6y agoMaybe people don't like to have to follow a link to understand a comment. E.g. the one at the top of this discussion doesn't even mention that it's about extrapolation. But as the HN rules say, speculating about downvotes is often fruitless.
- jacknews 6y agoIt'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.
- sudhirj 6y agoAlso, 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.
- sudhirj 6y agoAnd in other news, continuously extrapolating exponential or compound growth without regards to maturity scenarios will result in whatever you're extrapolating eventually occupying all atoms and energy in the universe.
- gridlockd 6y agoIf 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?
- mellosouls 6y agoThis 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-testable-theory-stating-that-information-has-mass-and-could-account-for-universes-dark-matter/ https://www.technology.org/2020/01/24/physicist-proposes-a-t... https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5123794 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.
- dilyevsky 6y agoExplains why I’m getting heavier each year
- koalala 6y agoperhaps we shouldn't be so quick to dismiss the idea, as there's an interesting link with emergent gravity, the central claim of which is that the density of quantum entanglement in a volume is proportional to how strongly space curves there.
- mellosouls 6y agoI was pretty dismissive but I'm not qualified to judge whether it's crackpot or a category misunderstanding (eg drives weigh differently according to the configuration of data on them, but not relevent to information itself). If it's crackpot, I'd love it to be true, it's so simple sounding.
- MrYellowP 6y agoThis 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
- wombatmobile 6y ago> He didn't consider the advances in compression. Or redundancy in the source. Or redundancy in the source.
- jonnypotty 6y agoMy 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.
- greatgib 6y agoJust 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.
- petercooper 6y agoA senior lecturer at a British university apparently.
- gpsx 6y agoWow, 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.
- perl4ever 6y agoIs 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.