The Internet is massive. But does it have … real mass? Of course, vast server farms and fiber optic cables do it, but we do not mean internet infrastructure. We mean the Internet itself. Information. Data. Cybernetics. And because storing and transferring things in cyberspace requires energy – which, according to Einstein, has a mass – should be theoretically possible to calculate the weight of the Internet.
In teenagers on the Internet, in 2006, a Harvard physicist named Russell Seitz attempted. His request? If you take into account the mass of energy driving the servers, the internet comes out about 50 grams – or by weight of a few strawberries. People still utilize Seitz’s comparison to that day. We all waste our lives on something that we could swallow with one bite!
But a lot has happened since 2006 – Instagram, iPhones and Bum Ai to mention only a few. (According to Seitz’s logic, the Internet would now weigh the same as a potato.) There is also the fact that during the calculations of Seitz Discover magazine proposed a another method. Information on the Internet is written in bit, so what if you look at the weight of the electrons needed to encode these bits? Using the entire internet traffic – and then estimated at 40 petabytes – discovering the indicator on the Internet to a diminutive part (5 million) grams. So more like squeezing strawberry juice. Wired thought that the time had come to explore himself.
First: server energy method. “Fifty grams are simply wrong,” says Christopher White, president Nec laboratories America and a veteran of organized Bell Bell laboratories. Other scientists we talked to have agreed. Daniel Whiteson, a particle physicist at UC Irvine and Cohost Podcast The unique universe of Daniel and KellyHe said that this is a too convenient way to get “units you want” – as a donut price can be calculated by dividing the total number of donuts in the world by GDP. Ridiculous! It would give us a doughnut figure for a dollar, “but it would not be correct and even close,” says Whiteson.
Discover the warehouse calculations seemed a bit to us. This has more to do with internet transmission, unlike the Internet itself. It also assumes a fixed number of electrons needed to encode the information. In fact, this number is extremely diverse and depends on specific systems and circuits.
White suggested the third method. What if we pretend to put all data stored on the Internet, in all hundreds of millions of servers around the world, in one place? How much energy would we have to encode this data and how much would this energy weigh? In 2018, the international data corporation estimated that by 2025 175 Zettabajtesor 1.65 x 1024 Bits. (1 zettabajte = 10247 bytes and 1 byte = 8 bits.) White suggested to multiply these bits by the mathematical term – KBT LN2, if you are curious – that it intercepts the minimum energy needed for a little reset. (Temperature is a factor, because storage of data is easier in colder conditions. Significant: the Internet is lighter in space than in Tucson in Arizona.) We can then take the number that will represent energy and call E = mc2 To reach a total mass. At room temperature, the whole internet would weigh (1.65 x 1024) x (2.9 × 10-21)/C2or 5.32 x 10-14 We play. It’s 53 Quadillions gram.
What … it’s not fun. Even if there is almost no physical mass, the internet still feelings Hefty, for those billions of us burdened with it every day. White, who had previously tried similar philosophical estimates, explained that in fact the network is so complicated that it is “essentially unknowable”, but why not try? In recent years, scientists have given the idea of storing data in nature elements: DNA. What if we were to weigh the internet in these conditions? Current estimates Say that 1 gram DNA can cod 215 petabytes – or 215 x 1015 bytes – information. If the internet is 175 x 10247 Bytes, it’s 960 947 grams of DNA. It’s the same as 10.6 American men. Or a third of cyberspace. Or 64,000 strawberries.
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