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

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 ∼1024 bits/s, and that it may perhaps exceed the corresponding rate for the current technosphere by ∼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 ∼90 years in the future, reflecting its increasing dominance.

Manasvi Lingam, Adam Frank, Amedeo Balbi

Comments: Published in Life; 14 pages; 1 figure
Subjects: Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph); Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Biological Physics (physics.bio-ph); Molecular Networks (q-bio.MN); Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE)
Cite as: arXiv:2309.07922 [physics.soc-ph] (or arXiv:2309.07922v1 [physics.soc-ph] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2309.07922
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Journal reference: Life, Vol. 13, No. 9, 1850 (2023)
Related DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3390/life13091850
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Submission history
From: Manasvi Lingam
[v1] Tue, 5 Sep 2023 03:08:34 UTC (52 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.07922
Astrobiology