Now What?

I feel that Maccone's result will stick. It was done at MIT, near where Claude Shannon saw the mathematical meaning of Information, and in the place where Seth Lloyd has been endeavouring for years to tame Information. This young man did it.

Now we know that Information exists and is the set of records. Google is increasing at an exponential rate the Information content of the biosphere. More and more records are stored all over the world by this company.

Will there be a phase transition when this amount of information reaches a threshold value?

If Quantum Mechanics is any guide, the threshold may be when the quantum correlation reaches macroscopic proportions. How many Terabytes is that?

Now an exterrnal USB drive of two Terabytes is only $200 US Cy. My son is already running out of memory in Warrenville. A wild guess will then be, more than 10²¹ bytes. One Laptop Per Child.

What will happen then?

Even considering the electricity to run so many laptops, this number does not seem to be earth shattering.

At this point we may have a first phase transition, maybe with more enlightened Indigo Digital Native Rascals; but that won't be affecting Earth's orbit, nor anything like that.

I know that I do not have a handle on the consequences of Maccone's finding, I'm just trying to figure those out literally as I am typing this note.

The feeling I get is that something is being cleared in my head, but I am still in a haze.