From time to time, articles appear in newspapers about experiments on weighing the human soul. The point of such experiments is to accurately measure a person’s body weight just before the moment of death. When a person finally dies, his weight becomes slightly less. This means, the authors of the articles come to the conclusion, the human soul has a certain mass, which the material shell is deprived of at the moment of death.
Some argue: who, when and in which hospitals carried out these types of checks? The patient is given various injections every minute and generally undergoes all sorts of medical procedures on him, which cannot but affect his body weight. In addition, biological processes constantly occur in the body, which are also an obstacle to such research. When dying, a person relaxes his sphincters with all the ensuing consequences... But the greatest and strongest objection to stories about measuring the body weight of a dying person is purely ethical. It is unlikely that anyone would think of killing a bunch of people on electronic scales just to collect truly reliable and accurate information.
The Oxford scientist Mr. Vaster organized the experiment in a different way. Without asking philosophical questions about the existence of the soul, he preferred to check whether information in principle had any weight in itself. His research turned out to be elementary, but quite ingenious and, undoubtedly, can be repeated by anyone if desired. Vaster checked the newly purchased blank DVDs on high-precision scales, after which he recorded information on them and checked again. Incredibly, after recording the information, the same DVDs began to weigh more! A problem has arisen: information is applied to the disk using a laser, which burns holes on the metal layer, which leads to oxidation and a change in its mass. The scientist had to conduct an experiment with other information storage devices - hard drives, which, in terms of the amount of data they can hold, are many times greater than any other device. It turns out that after recording, their change in weight will be even clearer and more noticeable. The assumption was confirmed! In addition, when all data was deleted from the disk, its mass returned to its original state. Flash drives were chosen next for unusual experiments, which said the final decisive word: information really does have a certain (albeit very small) weight. After reviewing the research results, Vaster calculated that the weight of information is not affected by the type of media and is 1x10-10 grams per 1GB of binary data.
This gave rise to one extremely serious conclusion. Based on Albert Einstein’s world-famous formula E = mс2, it is simply obvious that the transmission of information requires energy, the size of which will vary depending on the amount of information. If there is not a lot of data (up to several hundred KB, as with telegraph communication or talking on a walkie-talkie), only a little energy will be required. A television image requires much more significant energy investments, which is why such a signal is transmitted over relatively short distances. The range of high-quality reception even from powerful television stations is usually no higher than 80 km, despite the fact that, for example, the coverage of the Ostankino tower should be 200 km, especially if there is a well-installed receiving antenna. The transmission of information to (and from) rockets and space stations is no longer complete without the most complex and huge antennas with very sensitive amplifiers - the level of signal both astronauts and their earthly colleagues receive from each other is so low.
Information transmitted by transmitters located near such distant planets as Uranus or Saturn requires colossal long-space communication antenna installations with rare cryogenic amplifiers for reception. Simply put, an optical or electrical signal that does not carry any information is one thing, while a signal that carries information is something completely different. As the information transmitted by it increases, its specific gravity will increase and, accordingly, energy costs will increase. This discovery easily explains the “paradox of silence”: while admitting the possibility of the existence of many thousands of other intelligent civilizations in the Universe, we are not able to receive the signals they transmit into space due to the fact that the latter have their own specific weight. A broadcast program is a kind of information projectile. Depending on the distance that he must cover unhindered, he needs a certain energy potential. For information to fly to us from another galaxy, we need truly fantastic power.
Turning once again to Einstein's E=mc2, it is easy to realize: with a lack of energy - E, the greater the weight of information - m, the weaker the speed of signal propagation - c. Another point that follows from this: if information has specific gravity, it means it can exert resistance on any other information, inhibiting and weakening it.
PosmoLet's take this example: if you fire a shot from a gun or pistol in airless space (say, on the Moon), the flying bullet will not reduce speed during its flight. On our planet, it will be stopped by the air, which is why in practice the firing range is always lower than the theoretical one. However, in addition to the air envelope, our Earth is also surrounded by information: thousands of television towers, cell phones and other wireless devices distribute gigabytes and terabytes of all kinds of information in all directions. Therefore, any information signal is buried in it, as a result we need very high-quality and sensitive transceiver equipment. If the broadcast is carried out from space, millions of thousands of kilometers away from us, then such information has no chance of getting through the earth’s information cushion.
We would also like to present another hypothesis made by Mr. Vaster. He believes that if at the moment of death the material shell of a person actually loses at least a gram of mass precisely due to the exit of the soul from it (and according to some statements, the body weight decreases by as much as 30g), then the soul has an information capacity of approximately one billion GB . It turns out that even with the amazing current pace of development of computer technology, the emergence of full-fledged artificial intelligence that could compare with human consciousness will most likely never happen. Even the most complex programs today extremely rarely “weigh” more than 10GB, but this is millions of times less than the theoretical information “volume” of the soul.
Moreover, it is unlikely that people will be able to invent a machine with sufficient computing power to run such a “program” on it. Perhaps this is a Divine ban on the development of artificial intelligence...
