The Internet is a pretty big thing, but does it have any real physical mass? Servers and kilometers of fiber optic cables, sure, but in this case we’re talking about the Internet itself. Information, data, cybernetics… and since storing and moving things in cyberspace requires energy, which, according to Einstein, has mass, it would be theoretically possible to calculate how much the Internet itself weighs.
Back in 2006, Harvard physicist Russell Seitz made the first attempt to calculate the mass of the Internet, and the result was no more than 50 grams, which is equivalent to the weight of two strawberries. The following year, Discover magazine took a different approach: given that information on the Internet is recorded in bits, the researchers thought —what if we used the weight of the electrons needed to encode these bits? Using all Internet traffic, which at the time was estimated at 40 petabytes, Discover determined that the mass of the Internet is equal to 5 millionths of a gram.
Given that many years have passed since the last calculation and many changes have occurred (the development of social networks, devices, and the AI boom, among others), Wired magazine decided to survey researchers again and determine the actual weight of the modern Internet. Most generally agreed that the Zeitz and Discover estimates were outdated — but the data they provided varied even more.
For example, Christopher Weitz, president of NEC Laboratories America, offered a third and more accurate method, in his opinion. He calculated the amount of energy required to encode all the information on the Internet if it were placed on one server and derived the mass of the Internet from it. In 2018, the International Data Corporation estimated that by 2025, the total amount of data on the Internet will reach 175 zettabytes — 1.65 × 1024(1 zetabyte = 10247 bytes, 1 byte = 8 bits.) If we multiply this number by the Boltzmann constant and temperature, and then derive the mass from the formula for the equivalence of mass and energy (E = mc2), we get the value 5.32 x 10–14 grams, or 53 quadrillion grams.
In recent years, scientists have come up with the idea of storing data in the very building blocks of nature — DNA. So another approach to the mass of the Internet involves calculations in these units. According to current estimates, 1 gram of DNA can store 215 petabytes (or 215 × 10¹⁵ bytes) of information. If the total volume of the Internet is 175 × 10²¹ bytes, then it would take 960,947 grams of DNA to store it — Wired writes that this is the equivalent of the weight of 10.6 average Americans, 1/3 of the mass of a Cybertruck, or 64,000 strawberries.
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