Is Earth primarily a planet of life, managed by animals, plants, bacteria, and everything else that lives here, or is it a planet dominated by human creation? Indeed, we’ve reshaped our homes in a variety of ways, from emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to literally redrawing our coastlines. But in a sense, biology wins without a fight.
In an opinion article published in journal life On August 31, astronomers and astrobiologists estimated the amount of information transmitted by a vast variety of living things and communication technologies. The results are clear. Earth’s biosphere is churning out far more information than the Internet has obtained in its 30-year history. “This shows that even though humanity has made rapid progress, nature is much more remarkable in terms of its complexity,” he says. Manasvi Lingaman astrobiologist at the Florida Institute of Technology and one of the authors of the paper.
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But that could change in the near future. Lingam and his colleagues say that if the Internet continues to grow at its current rate, it will eclipse the data available from the biosphere within a century. This could help refine the search for intelligent life on other planets by telling us what kind of information to look for.
To express information from technology, the authors focused on the amount of data transferred via the Internet, which far exceeds any other form of human communication. The Internet carries approximately 40 terabytes of information every second. They then compared that to the amount of information flowing through Earth’s biosphere. We may not think of the natural world as a realm of big data, but living things have their own ways of communicating. “In my opinion, one of the reasons behind the complexity of the biosphere, although not the only one, is the enormous amount of information flow associated with it,” Lingam says.
Indeed, bird calls, whale songs, and pheromones are all forms of communication. But Lingam and his colleagues focused on the information that individual cells convey in the form of molecules that respond to the information they convey, often by being picked up by other cells and producing specific proteins. The authors focused specifically on his 100 unicellular prokaryotes that make up the cell. Most of our planet’s biomass.
“This is pretty representative of most life on Earth,” he says. andrew rushbyHe is an astrobiologist at Birkbeck, University of London, but was not an author on the paper. “It’s just a green slime that clings to the surface of the earth. Sometimes there are a few primates running around on it.”
The authors estimate that all prokaryotes on Earth send signals to each other, generating about a billion times more data than our technology. But human progress is rapid: one quote, the Internet is growing at about 26% every year. Under the bold assumption that both these rates will remain stable over the next several decades, the authors predict that their size will continue to expand until they dwarf the biosphere sometime in the early 22nd century, about 90 years from now. Stated.
So what would a world in which we produce more information than nature actually look like? It’s difficult to predict with certainty. The Earth of the 2110s may be as strange to us as the Earth of today is to someone in the 1930s. That said, imagine our planet being closely monitored by alien astronomers in another star system. Their first impression of Earth may be a torrent of digital data rather than a glimpse of a planet teeming with natural life.
Now imagine the opposite. For decades, scientists and military experts have been searching for signatures of extraterrestrial life in any form.Astronomers have traditionally focused on the energy that intelligent civilizations might use, but earlier this year a group calculated the numbers The idea was to determine whether aliens in nearby star systems could pick up leaks from cell phone towers. (The answer is probably not, at least with technologies like LTE networks and today’s radio telescopes.)
Conversely, we do not yet have the observational capabilities to track extraterrestrial life forms. “I don’t think there is a way to detect these kinds of predictions or findings. [Lingam and his coauthors] We quantified it here,” Rushby said. “How can you determine this kind of information capacity or information transfer rate remotely? We’re probably not at a point where we can do that.”
But Rushby sees this study as an interesting next step in a trend. Astrobiologists, and certainly those exploring extraterrestrial life, are increasingly thinking about the type and amount of information that different forms of life hold. “There seems to be an information ‘revolution’ taking place. We are starting to think about life a little differently,” he says. In the end, we may find that there is more harmony between nature’s communication networks and computers.
