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

Manasvi Lingam; Adam Frank; Amedeo Balbi

doi:10.3390/life13091850

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

Life (Basel). 2023 Aug 31;13(9):1850. doi: 10.3390/life13091850.

Authors

Manasvi Lingam^{1

2}, Adam Frank³, Amedeo Balbi⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Aerospace, Physics and Space Sciences, Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne, FL 32901, USA.
² Department of Physics and Institute for Fusion Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA.
³ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14620, USA.
⁴ Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Roma "Tor Vergata", 00133 Roma, Italy.

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.

Keywords: biosphere; information transmission; internet; molecular communication; planetary intelligence; technosphere.

Grants and funding

The research undertaken by M.L. and A.F. was funded by the NASA Exobiology program under the grant 80NSSC22K1009. M.L. acknowledges fiscal support from the Florida Tech Open Access Subvention Fund.