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HOW MUCH DOES THE INTERNET WEIGH?

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Original Author: Stephen Cass
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HOW MUCH DOES THE INTERNET WEIGH?
Article by: Stephen Cass/ from DISCOVER magazine (June 2007)
The internet is currently the largest body of information in the world. Almost everyone has had their share of internet use, but we don’t really know the measured weight of this overwhelming source of information. Everything in the internet, from video clips to emails, is a form of information. Yet surprisingly, Stephen Cass and other people from DISCOVER magazine were not able to find any research on the internet’s weight; thus, they decided to do it themselves.
The first step to calculating the internet’s weight is to understand the process by which data is processed across the net. Information is said to be reduced to packets that are a dozen to a thousand/ more bytes in size. In addition, these packets contain addressing details so that computers that transport data (routers) know where to send the packets to. These packets are usually received and stored by a number of transmitting computers (repeaters) before they reach the addressee. This is done through the movement of electrons or light pulses (for fiber optic cables). But according to Cass, these electrons or radio waves are not what are important in determining the internet’s weight; rather it is the bit pattern they describe. These patterns are the blueprints for the data packets that simply get rebuilt each time they are received by computers in a network. Thus, it is the bits’ weight that is important.
Data is transferred through electrical pulses or bits mathematically represented by the numbers 1 or 0. The capacitors of a computer’s memory are the ones that remember if a bit is a 1 or 0. The number depends on whether the capacitor is charged or not; basically, 40,000 electrons are needed for it to be charged and become a 1. Meanwhile, an uncharged capacitor spells 0. Given that there are 8 bits in a byte, 1,024 bytes in a kilobyte, and the very small weight of an electron (think: 2 x 10 raised to the -30th degree pounds),
then one would be able to compute the weight of the internet with this formula:
8 bits x 1,024 bytes x # of kilobytes x # of 1's (since this represents a cell's charged capacitor) x 40,000 electrons x given weight of an electron
So now the problem is finding out just how much information actually traverses the internet. Luckily, DISCOVER found a reliable source for this—Clifford Holiday, who has been able to track down the “total amount of internet traffic by the activity of end-user connections” (i.e. DSL, dial-up modem connections, etc.). Holiday found that 75 percent of internet traffic comes from file sharing, and only 9 percent comes from email. He then estimated the total amount of internet traffic to be 40 petabytes, which looks like this:
40,000,000,000,000,000
That’s a lot! Now multiply that number to the weight of a single electron and voila! The researchers have found that the estimated weight of the internet is actually a measly 0.2 MILLIONTHS of an ounce—almost the weight of a miniscule grain of sand. 
It is truly ironic that the largest body of information known to man actually weighs like a singular grain of sand…an almost insignificant weight. This fact is a good reminder of our own insignificance in the world, for even the so-called knowledge that we are proud of is as…dust. Indeed, the prophet’s word’s ring true:  from dust we come, and to dust we shall return.
 
Published: June 07, 2007
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