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The Internet Science

Scientists Debate Actual Weight of the Internet (wired.com) 54

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
The internet's physical mass remains contested among scientists, with estimates ranging from a strawberry to something almost unimaginably small. In 2006, Harvard physicist Russell Seitz calculated the internet weighed roughly 50 grams based on server energy, a figure that would now equate to potato-weight given internet growth.

Christopher White, president of NEC Laboratories America, has dismissed this calculation as "just wrong." White suggests a more accurate method that accounts for the energy needed to encode all internet data in one place, yielding approximately 53 quadrillionths of a gram at room temperature. Alternatively, if the internet's projected 175 zettabytes of data were stored in DNA -- a storage medium scientists are actively exploring -- it would weigh 960,947 grams, equivalent to 10.6 American males. Though scientists debate measurement methods, White asserts the web's true complexity makes it "essentially unknowable."
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Scientists Debate Actual Weight of the Internet More

Scientists Debate Actual Weight of the Internet

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  • What is the Internet? It can't *just* be the data. The whole point of it is it enables that data to be moved from one place to another. So at the very least you would have to include the mass of the wires.

    • Re:What is the Internet? (Score:5, Funny)

      by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Monday April 07, 2025 @02:16PM (#65287391)

      C'mon, Jen, everyone knows the Internet doesn't weigh anything. And it's wireless. They keep it at the top of Big Ben because that's where the reception is best.

      https://youtu.be/iDbyYGrswtg?s... [youtu.be]

    • I thought we argued about this before at least once here but can't find it now.

      As the Internet is by definition a network of networks and those networks don't exist without the hardware they run on, and they include every client, you have to add to the weight of every single piece of equipment involved, both the networking gear and all of the servers AND CLIENTS. Every desktop, every tablet, every phone whether cellular or POTS even because all LD calls are carried on the internet now.

      • I agree. It has to weigh a lot.

        It's the sort of question Buckminster Fuller used to ask. Something worth considering as it is likely fast approaching the possibility of outweighing all living creatures on earth in more ways than one.
      • All of that takes power to run also, the power plants requiring mining, on and on. It’s a bit like saying what the weight of a thought is. You really need to include the hardware for the brain or the thought does not exist in reality, further the brain can’t do much without energy, or the body to control, or sensory input, and wouldn’t live long removed from its biosphere.

    • If the data only weighs as much as a potato. Then you need substantially less bandwidth than a stationwagon filled with backup tapes to transfer the Internet.

    • What is the Internet?

      We've been through this before. The internet is a series of tubes. That Al Gore invented.

  • If The World asks you if the Internet makes it look fat, fake getting a phone call you "have to take" and leave the room.

  • A silly question (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Geoffrey.landis ( 926948 ) on Monday April 07, 2025 @02:17PM (#65287393) Homepage

    It's a silly question. The internet resides on the servers and memories of the computers that comprise it, any reasonable measurement would have to include the servers which hold it. Otherwise, it's like asking "what is the weight of your memories"? Well, your memories reside in your brain. You can't weigh the memories as if they were separate from the brain.

    Information itself has no weight. A FET holding a specific bit, 1 or 0, doesn't weigh any more or less than one holding a random bit (0 or 1 are both information. A random bit has no information.)

  • Mass != Weight (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Monday April 07, 2025 @02:23PM (#65287419) Journal
    I suspect they were debating the _mass_ of the internet. While weight and mass have some degree of equivalence in a constant gravitational field the internet is distributed around the globe and so it really makes a huge difference in this case since the direction of the gravitational field varies a lots over the surface of the Earth even if the magnitude is only varies a little. So to calculate the weight you not only need to worry about how to calculate the mass but where that mass is located.

    If we assume that the internet is roughly evenly distributed around the planet then he weight of the internet would be close to zero because weight is the force exerted by gravity on an object and summed uniformly over the surface of a sphere that would give zero. However, the Earth is not a perfect sphere and the variations in distribution would mean cancellation would not be perfect, so the result would likely be a very small weight.

    However, if we assume the internet is largely located around the northern hemisphere there will still be a lot of cancellation of the weight and what's left will have a direction pointing towards somewhere close to the south pole.

    • Your need to revisit physics 101 sometime. Weight doesnt cancel out from opposing masses because gravity is an attractive force, not a repulsive one, otherwise stars and planets couldnt form.

      • Your need to revisit physics 101 sometime.

        I do revisit it, usually when I teach it.

        Weight doesnt cancel out from opposing masses because gravity is an attractive force, not a repulsive one

        Weight is a vector quantity and, when those two vectors are pointing in opposite directions it absolutely can and does cancel out. If you have two masses that make up the distributed internet located on polar opposite sides of the planet both will be attracted towards the centre of the planet and so will have exactly opposite weights that, when you sum them to find the total weight of the entire internet will give zero.

        So yes, Newtonian gravity is only attractiv

        • Weight is a vector quantity

          Ehh, you *can* define it that way, but it's often defined as a scalar quantity W=mg, were m and g are both scalars, and *always* used that way in common parlance (and scientific parlance rarely considers weight). Even the most anal physicist, if asked their weight, would only give it in vector notation if they were trying to make a point.

          • Ehh, you *can* define it that way, but it's often defined as a scalar quantity W=mg, were m and g are both scalars

            'g' is not a scalar. Think about it for a second: if 'g' were a scalar then why does it have a direction? Scalars do not have a direction, gravitational fields do. You cannot define weight as a scalar, it is defined as a vector quantity. You do tend to ignore this because in most situations the direction of "down" is constant and when all your vectors are parallel they do add just like scalars and so people forget that it is a vector but weight is and always has been a vector.

            Even in common parlance eve

    • Unless the mass is given by a rather loquacious priest. And then it's a very long wait.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Potor ( 658520 )

        Unless the mass is given by a rather loquacious priest. And then it's a very long wait.

        took me a bit. bravo

  • More interesting.... (Score:3)

    by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Monday April 07, 2025 @03:09PM (#65287549) Homepage

    ... would be the physical weight of the hardware that runs it - servers, routers , gateways, cables, boosters, client devices etc , and the amount of power it requires which I suspect is probably that of a small country.

  • Stupid story. The internet is networks. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by greytree ( 7124971 ) on Monday April 07, 2025 @03:12PM (#65287555)
    "We mean the internet itself. The information. The data."

    The internet is networks. NOT THE DATA.

    They might *tenuously* stretch "the internet's data" as the data that is actually travelling on the network at any one time.

    But the internet is very much *not* all the data that is actually just sitting on powered-down hard drives, IRRELEVANT to calculating anything to do with the networks it might - or probably not - one day travel on.

    Wired, since it started, has always been about arty wankers trying to muscle in on the work of us nerds, and only showing their ignorance.
    Shame on Slashdot for giving them attention.

  • Science doesn't typically deal in philosophy. And that's what this question ultimately is. A modern philosophical question. How to you weigh / measure a network topology if you aren't including the hardware? You can't. You don't. It's like asking how much a dream weighs. The Internet is the network, the connections, the data flying to and fro. You can't weigh that, nor does it have a mass. I can't imagine anyone thinking of themselves as a scientist would entertain this question as a part of science. As a f

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by XanC ( 644172 )

      What do you think a PhD stands for? Science is a branch of philosophy.

      Totally agree with your overall point though.

  • Bigly even.

    This is not the stupidest clickbait ever posted but it's BRILLIANT and a LIFE-HACK and YOU WON"T BELIEVE IT and A DOCTOR says "something" and it will CURE YOUR HEMMOROIDS and FIX YOUR BLOOD SUGAR and STOP YOUR FOOT FUNGUS and CUT YOUR BELLY FAT.

    Not in six months. Not in 90 days. TOMORROW. You'll be a new you. Bigly.

    Also it's entirely irrelevant what "the Internet weighs" and how to equation-ize mass to energy and how to sum energy of so many disparate systems (that would be the Bigly Internet

  • There are too many scientists in too few jobs.

  • This is yet another case of people confusing the Internet with the World Wide Web. The Internet is not information -- it is a network over which information is transferred. As such it is made up of networking equipment, routers, switches, cables, etc; the collective weight of which is surely many thousands of tons.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by marcle ( 1575627 )

      I'd say that's an underestimate. The many thousands of miles of cable and fiber must weigh some orders of magnitude more than that.

  • Maybe America males need to spend less time debating the weight of the internet and more time running around looking for it.

  • How heavy are all the bits stored in RAM required for internet to operate ?

    • I broke my desk the other day. I added more RAM to my laptop. Then I started Chrome, about that same time the table crumbled under the weight of all those bits in memory. I should have stayed at 640k.

  • ... "how loud is blue"?

    (I mean, I know weed is largely legal now, but still ...)

  • Know how sometimes a company sends you a tiny box packed in a huge peanut-laded shipping box?

    Sizing the internet and it's packaging is like that... but it's more like you packaged a strawberry in the Empire State Building.

  • The real question they should be answering is, "How much does the Library of Congress weigh?", because that's how we quantify the information on the Internet.

  • It's equal to g times the total mass of the people it attracts.

  • I wonder how many went into *this* important research.

  • The whole web does not allow itself to be even a paperweight.

  • Information is intangible, but (Score:3)

    by Beeftopia ( 1846720 ) on Monday April 07, 2025 @11:30PM (#65288683)

    Information, while real, is intangible. It has no physical properties (Plato started pondering this curiosity [wikipedia.org] millennia ago, about a realm where perfect concepts existed, for example straight lines and other geometry). What the information is encoded in however, can have physical properties.

    So, what is the information encoded in? Is it just the electrons on the wire, the radio waves in cellular or wifi?. What about the server and cables and switches? Dark servers and wires aren't the Internet. It has to have power flowing through it all, and with that, electrons encoded with information, to transmit that information.

    The core function of the Internet is the transmission of information. Electricity flowing through the wires only, with no information encoded, wouldn't be the Internet. It would be a vast network of USB chargers.

    But if we ignore the weight of the cables and servers, why only look at the weight of the electrons? All have to work together to transmit information. The electrons are the actual medium in which the information is encoded, so I think it's fair to just look at their weight.

    However, if we want to get as close as possible to the core functionality of the Internet, information transmission.... the information weighs nothing. It has no physical properties. It's intangible.

  • An important point is that the weight of the internet follows the daily usage pattern -- internet activity is much higher on the daylight hemisphere as many more people are awake so their internet traffic increases the weight.

    This means: the ever-heavier daylight burdens will cause an unbalanced wobble in the planet as it rotates. Because the weight of the internet increases year by year, the wobble will worsen and the Earth will eventually escape its orbit. We're all gonna die...

  • The internet does not exist without the stuff holding and sending and receiving the data. Just like people do not exist without their bodies. That means you have to include the mass of all the servers, power stations, computers, satellites, data exchanges, cables, fiber optics, etc that it exists on. So it is actually massive not the mass of a strawberry.

  • The Internet is a potato.

  • Alternatively, if the internet's projected 175 zettabytes of data were stored in DNA -- a storage medium scientists are actively exploring -- it would weigh 960,947 grams

    How do they get six digits out of three?

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