Talking big figures (while we wait for the US election's big figures)

I've been browsing arXiv again, and turned up this recent paper The Information Catastrophe:

Currently we produce 10 to power 21 digital bits of information annually on Earth. Assuming 20 percent annual growth rate, we estimate that 350 years from now, the number of bits produced will exceed the number of all atoms on Earth, or 10 to power 50. After 250 years, the power required to sustain this digital production will exceed 18.5 TW, or the total planetary power consumption today, and 500 years from now the digital content will account for more than half of the Earths mass, according to the mass energy information equivalence principle. Besides the existing global challenges such as climate, environment, population, food, health, energy and security, our estimates here point to another singularity event for our planet, called the Information Catastrophe. 

Um, not entirely sure what to make of this.  All sounds a bit silly, really.  Here is the conclusion:

In conclusion, we established that the incredible growth of digital information production would reach a singularity point when there are more digital bits created than atoms on the planet. At the same time, the digital information production alone will consume most of the planetary power capacity, leading to ethical and environmental concerns already recognized by Floridi, who introduced the concept of “infosphere” and considered challenges posed by our digital information society [27]. These issues are valid regardless of the future developments in data storage technologies. In terms of digital data, the mass-energy-information equivalence principle formulated in 2019 has not been yet verified experimentally, but assuming this is correct, then in not a very distant future, most of the planet’s mass will be made up of bits of information. Applying the law of conservation in conjunction with the mass-energy-information equivalence principle, it means that the mass of the planet is unchanged over time. However, our technological progress inverts radically the distribution of the Earth’s matter from predominantly ordinary matter, to the fifth form of digital information matter. One could say that we are literally changing the planet bit by bit. In this context, assuming the planetary power limitations are solved, we could envisage a future World mostly computer simulated and dominated by digital bits and computer code.