Scientists Debate Actual Weight of the Internet (wired.com) 38
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."
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."
What is the Internet? (Score:2)
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)
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]
Re: What is the Internet? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: What is the Internet? (Score:3)
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.
Re: What is the Internet? (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Pro tip (Score:2)
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)
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.)
Re: (Score:2)
"How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" 2025 edition.
Re:A silly question (Score:4, Insightful)
"How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"
Well an angel is 1,000 ft in altitude, so about 328 until the top of the atmosphere.
Pauli exclusion [Re:A silly question] (Score:2)
"How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"
I'd say two, one spin-up and one spin-down.
Re: (Score:2)
What is the weight of all the ideas in the world?
Re: (Score:2)
Information itself has no weight.
It has a negative weight: the more information you put on a punch card, the lighter it becomes.
Re: A silly question (Score:2)
Mass != Weight (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: Mass != Weight (Score:2)
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.
Physics Lesson (Score:2)
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
Re: Physics Lesson (Score:2)
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.
Re: Mass != Weight (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
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:2)
... 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:2)
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 i
"Scientists?" (Score:2)
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)
What do you think a PhD stands for? Science is a branch of philosophy.
Totally agree with your overall point though.
THIS REALLY MATTERS AND IT'S BRILLIANT (Score:1)
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
Clear proof that (Score:2)
There are too many scientists in too few jobs.
People confusing the Internet and the Web, again. (Score:1)
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)
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.
Wait 90kg American male? (Score:1)
Maybe America males need to spend less time debating the weight of the internet and more time running around looking for it.
RAM (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
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.
A bit like asking ... (Score:2)
... "how loud is blue"?
(I mean, I know weed is largely legal now, but still ...)
Greatest case of "Overpackaging" ever (Score:2)
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 (Score:2)