Don: “I just realized that I’ve written over 1,300 of these blog entries.”
Reader: “You should make your essays shorter to save the planet.”
Don: “Why? Some ideas require more support than others. Essays should be as long as they should be, each one its own length. How am I endangering anything? Should Dostoyevsky have written a short novella called Crime and Punishment? Hmnn, when I think about it, do I really need to go into such detail about the tortured mind of Raskolnikov? Fewer pages might have saved some trees since that novel's publication in 1866 and its subsequent status as required reading in university literature courses.”
Reader: “Actually, that’s a different, but related, matter. Yes, his works appear in books; books are made of paper; paper is made from trees as you note. Dostoyevsky, aided by literature professors, killed a number of trees, but they don’t come close to what you are doing online. Go ahead; your verbosity is changing the planet. You don’t know what you’re doing to the planet, but every long blog diminishes the planet, bit by byte, atom by atom.”
Don: “The planet? Or should I ask, ‘What planet?’ How do my essays affect the planet? They’re on the Web; they don’t consume paper. I should put a disclaimer at the head of every blog entry: No trees were killed in the production of this essay.”
Reader: “I know you think a paperless world has little effect on Earth, at least, not the effect books have. That’s understandable; look at your personal library. You have hundreds of books. What’s that in trees? Gotta be the weight of a Mini Cooper at least? A stand of trees was destroyed just so you could have a personal library, but...”
Don: “Those trees were destined to die anyway. Now they’ve been preserved, possibly through my great, great, great grandchildren’s lifetimes or longer. So, in a sense, I’m preserving the planet, or at least, the trees, by buying, reading, and storing books.”
Reader: “Really? You think they’re going to keep those books around in a digital age? In an age of Kindle, it’s kindling status for most of those books, or landfill fill, I’m thinking. But I digress. Your digital footprint is changing the planet, and that’s what I’m getting at. Your blogs are devouring Earth atom by atom.”
Don: How, may I ask, does the writing of a blog diminish Earth and change atoms?”
Reader: “Hasn’t it dawned on you, Don, that your blogs require both storage hardware AND energy? Every digital bit is a conversion of physical Earth into information. And I’m not just talking about hardware, servers, and stuff like portable hard drives and CDs. According to Melvin Vopson, we are just a little under a century and a half from needing all the energy we currently produce to sustain our digital information.* And he says that by 2245, one half our planet’s mass might be converted into digital information. Of course, that’s hard to comprehend, but Vopson works on the assumption that information is the fifth form of matter that accompanies solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. Information. Yes. Information. We just don’t think of it as something like the matter with which we are so familiar. But think about one of the points made by the late Stephen Hawking who said that black holes remove information from the universe, so, an in-falling star is more than just a bunch of matter as we ordinarily think of it. It’s information. Vopson argues that there’s an information catastrophe a-coming and that according to the mass-energy-equivalence principle, in five centuries the digital content we produce will surpass half Earth’s mass.
“You watch YouTube, you alter Earth. You read your newspaper online, you alter Earth. Vopson says that in ten years, global communication technology might use as much as 51% of the global electricity production. If growth continues at the current rate, there won’t be enough energy to sustain the information exchange. Think about it. You have a few readers; some people have millions. Some YouTubers get millions of hits. And that’s in a world in which not everyone has a computer. What happens when denizens of the deep Amazon and those of the Namib become a daily online presence? What happens when the billions of people who don’t have personal computers get one?”
Don: “Oh! Now I understand. I suppose the ideal is for me to just shut up to save Earth, but it’s so hard to be silent when my computer makes it so easy to produce digital bits that add up to bytes. I think; I write; and now I know I turn Earth into information.”
Reader: “Vopson quotes from an IBM estimate of 2.5 quintillion digital data bytes per day. You have to multiply that by 8 to get the number of bits. Global energy consumption is currently measured in Terawatt hours or in million tons of oil equivalent. That’s with only part of humanity online; only part living digital lives. What do you think will happen when population expands beyond eight billion, ten billion, or more, and a greater number of people are digitizing Earth?”
Don: “I’m getting a bit dizzy over the bits. Should we blame Gutenberg? He advanced what medieval monks did in copying manuscripts. And, now someone can go to Project Gutenberg to see more of those hard copies turned into digital books. I should just shut this conversation down before I use up too many atoms and actually become some denizen of a Tron program, living in a virtual world that now appears to be the destiny of my great, great, great grandchildren.”**
*Vopson, Melvin M. The information catastrophe. AIP Advances. Vol 10, Issue 8. https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0019941 Online at https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0019941
Accessed August 12, 2020. Vopson’s abstract begins, “Currently, we produce about 10^21 digital bits annually.” He further writes that the total number of atoms on Earth are, give or take a couple, 10^50, but with a current 20% annual growth rate in digital bits, after three centuries, the power required to sustain digital information will be greater than 18.5 x 10^15. Five centuries from now “digital content will account for more than half Earth’s mass, according to the mass-energy-information equivalence principle.”
**Of course, I couldn't leave this without drawing some analogy: Is it possible that many young people want socialism because they know more about virtual life than they know about real life and about the impoverishment, imprisonment, and murder justified by socialist regimes over the past 103 years? When people live in a digitized world, they take bytes for reality.
Reader: “You should make your essays shorter to save the planet.”
Don: “Why? Some ideas require more support than others. Essays should be as long as they should be, each one its own length. How am I endangering anything? Should Dostoyevsky have written a short novella called Crime and Punishment? Hmnn, when I think about it, do I really need to go into such detail about the tortured mind of Raskolnikov? Fewer pages might have saved some trees since that novel's publication in 1866 and its subsequent status as required reading in university literature courses.”
Reader: “Actually, that’s a different, but related, matter. Yes, his works appear in books; books are made of paper; paper is made from trees as you note. Dostoyevsky, aided by literature professors, killed a number of trees, but they don’t come close to what you are doing online. Go ahead; your verbosity is changing the planet. You don’t know what you’re doing to the planet, but every long blog diminishes the planet, bit by byte, atom by atom.”
Don: “The planet? Or should I ask, ‘What planet?’ How do my essays affect the planet? They’re on the Web; they don’t consume paper. I should put a disclaimer at the head of every blog entry: No trees were killed in the production of this essay.”
Reader: “I know you think a paperless world has little effect on Earth, at least, not the effect books have. That’s understandable; look at your personal library. You have hundreds of books. What’s that in trees? Gotta be the weight of a Mini Cooper at least? A stand of trees was destroyed just so you could have a personal library, but...”
Don: “Those trees were destined to die anyway. Now they’ve been preserved, possibly through my great, great, great grandchildren’s lifetimes or longer. So, in a sense, I’m preserving the planet, or at least, the trees, by buying, reading, and storing books.”
Reader: “Really? You think they’re going to keep those books around in a digital age? In an age of Kindle, it’s kindling status for most of those books, or landfill fill, I’m thinking. But I digress. Your digital footprint is changing the planet, and that’s what I’m getting at. Your blogs are devouring Earth atom by atom.”
Don: How, may I ask, does the writing of a blog diminish Earth and change atoms?”
Reader: “Hasn’t it dawned on you, Don, that your blogs require both storage hardware AND energy? Every digital bit is a conversion of physical Earth into information. And I’m not just talking about hardware, servers, and stuff like portable hard drives and CDs. According to Melvin Vopson, we are just a little under a century and a half from needing all the energy we currently produce to sustain our digital information.* And he says that by 2245, one half our planet’s mass might be converted into digital information. Of course, that’s hard to comprehend, but Vopson works on the assumption that information is the fifth form of matter that accompanies solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. Information. Yes. Information. We just don’t think of it as something like the matter with which we are so familiar. But think about one of the points made by the late Stephen Hawking who said that black holes remove information from the universe, so, an in-falling star is more than just a bunch of matter as we ordinarily think of it. It’s information. Vopson argues that there’s an information catastrophe a-coming and that according to the mass-energy-equivalence principle, in five centuries the digital content we produce will surpass half Earth’s mass.
“You watch YouTube, you alter Earth. You read your newspaper online, you alter Earth. Vopson says that in ten years, global communication technology might use as much as 51% of the global electricity production. If growth continues at the current rate, there won’t be enough energy to sustain the information exchange. Think about it. You have a few readers; some people have millions. Some YouTubers get millions of hits. And that’s in a world in which not everyone has a computer. What happens when denizens of the deep Amazon and those of the Namib become a daily online presence? What happens when the billions of people who don’t have personal computers get one?”
Don: “Oh! Now I understand. I suppose the ideal is for me to just shut up to save Earth, but it’s so hard to be silent when my computer makes it so easy to produce digital bits that add up to bytes. I think; I write; and now I know I turn Earth into information.”
Reader: “Vopson quotes from an IBM estimate of 2.5 quintillion digital data bytes per day. You have to multiply that by 8 to get the number of bits. Global energy consumption is currently measured in Terawatt hours or in million tons of oil equivalent. That’s with only part of humanity online; only part living digital lives. What do you think will happen when population expands beyond eight billion, ten billion, or more, and a greater number of people are digitizing Earth?”
Don: “I’m getting a bit dizzy over the bits. Should we blame Gutenberg? He advanced what medieval monks did in copying manuscripts. And, now someone can go to Project Gutenberg to see more of those hard copies turned into digital books. I should just shut this conversation down before I use up too many atoms and actually become some denizen of a Tron program, living in a virtual world that now appears to be the destiny of my great, great, great grandchildren.”**
*Vopson, Melvin M. The information catastrophe. AIP Advances. Vol 10, Issue 8. https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0019941 Online at https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0019941
Accessed August 12, 2020. Vopson’s abstract begins, “Currently, we produce about 10^21 digital bits annually.” He further writes that the total number of atoms on Earth are, give or take a couple, 10^50, but with a current 20% annual growth rate in digital bits, after three centuries, the power required to sustain digital information will be greater than 18.5 x 10^15. Five centuries from now “digital content will account for more than half Earth’s mass, according to the mass-energy-information equivalence principle.”
**Of course, I couldn't leave this without drawing some analogy: Is it possible that many young people want socialism because they know more about virtual life than they know about real life and about the impoverishment, imprisonment, and murder justified by socialist regimes over the past 103 years? When people live in a digitized world, they take bytes for reality.
RSS Feed