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

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 similar to 10(24) bits/s, and that it may perhaps exceed the corresponding rate for the current technosphere by similar to 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 similar to 90 years in the future, reflecting its increasing dominance.