Planetary Scale Information Transmission in the Biosphere and Technosphere: Limits and Evolution

TL;DR

This paper estimates the Earth's biosphere and technosphere's global information transmission rates, suggesting the technosphere may surpass the biosphere in information flow within a century under exponential growth assumptions.

Contribution

It introduces a heuristic model to quantify Earth's global information transmission, highlighting potential future dominance of the technosphere over the biosphere.

Findings

Biosphere's information transmission rate estimated at ~10^{24} bits/s

Technosphere's current rate is about 9 orders of magnitude higher than biosphere's

Technosphere may surpass biosphere in information flow within 90 years if exponential growth continues

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.