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

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 ∼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.