
The information catastrophe - sohkamyung
https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0019941
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taneq
This 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.

~~~
unishark
As economics say, if something can't go on forever, it won't.

~~~
glial
I've heard "trees don't grow to the sky."

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sudhirj
Also, 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
And 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.

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mellosouls
This 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-t...](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://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.

~~~
koalala
perhaps 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
I 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.

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greatgib
Just 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
A senior lecturer at a British university apparently.

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kanobo
I 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.

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perl4ever
Is 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.

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jonnypotty
My 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.

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jacknews
It'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.

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gpsx
Wow, 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.

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hyko
Is this is a real paper? [https://xkcd.com/605/](https://xkcd.com/605/)

~~~
danw1979
I’m not sure why you’re getting downvoted for such a succinct appraisal of
this paper...

~~~
bryanrasmussen
maybe 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
Maybe 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.

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MrYellowP
This 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
> He didn't consider the advances in compression.

Or redundancy in the source.

Or redundancy in the source.

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viksit
The 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.

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gridlockd
If 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?

