>By Vopson's calculations, the total mass of all the information we produce in a year is far less than a single grain of rice, or about equal to one E. Coli bacterium. But it's the potential for growth that concerns Vopson. In an extreme scenario where the amount of digital information grows by 50% annually, half of our planet's mass could be literally converted to bits within 225 years.<p>This reminds me of some future civlizations described in the X-Men series House of X / Powers of X, where entire planets become single entities of machine intelligence, and the information density gets so high that it collapses into a black hole.