

Ask HN: How much does the Internet weigh? - augiehill

A fun discussion topic that persists in my office: how much do you think 1GB of data weighs? By extension, how much does the Internet weigh?
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thaumaturgy
Neat. So, we can establish a lower bound, anyway. Let's start with one of the
newer mini usb flash drives that you can get these days, which weigh about 1
gram per 5 GB [1]. For the amount of data in the internet, we can start with
Google; in 2006 they were storing in the neighborhood of 220 TB [2], but by
2008 they were processing 20 petabytes per day [3].

So, just to invent a rough lower bound, let's say that Google processes the
internet every two days, and that they're storing 50% of it, so that's roughly
80 petabytes on the internet, for a minimum weight of about 16,000 kilograms,
or about 1/5th the weight of a blue whale, according to Wolfram-Alpha [4] --
as a lower bound.

I'm sure it's really quite a lot more than that, but probably not much more
than a blue whale or two.

[1]: <http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?p=STU32GPCG>

[2]: [http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/09/how-much-data-
does-...](http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/09/how-much-data-does-google-
store.html)

[3]: [http://techcrunch.com/2008/01/09/google-
processing-20000-ter...](http://techcrunch.com/2008/01/09/google-
processing-20000-terabytes-a-day-and-growing/)

[4]: <http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=16%2C000+kilograms>

~~~
RBerenguel
Maybe it should be a fail whale or two?

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dzlobin
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/jun/07/guardianwee...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/jun/07/guardianweeklytechnologysection1)

2 oz, apparently.

------
juxtaposition
The weight of an object is defined as being equal to the force exerted on it
by gravity. Take the object far away from any celestial bodies and you'll find
it weightless. Toss it into a black hole and it's weight will approach
infinity.

For the sake of simplicity, lets imagine that the internet is uniformly
distributed on the surface of the earth, as a single object. You will find
that the gravity of the earth pulls the internet from every direction with
equal force, and assuming the internet is a solid object, the net force is
zero, since the opposing forces negate each other. So in essence, the internet
as a single object is weightless, even on earth.

So that didn't work out. Lets instead assume that the internet is divided into
numerous parts so that the weight of each one can be summed together to give a
meaningful answer. So what is the internet? Is it the servers that run it? The
huge cables that run below the oceans? Or maybe internet can be best thought
of as the information it contains. Then what is information? Is it the
magnetic direction of the molecules of a harddisk? Is it the dents on a CD? Or
something else that can be thought of still being "physical" in nature? Or
does information on the storage devices only truly become _information_ once
it is observed and digested by a human mind?

How much calories would it take for a human brain to go trough all the
information on the internet? After finding out, use the calories to calculate
their mass by E=mc^2.

Or maybe the internet is the biomass of the humans involved in it? The biomass
of the users? Internet is after all, an "international network". Is it a
network of machines or a network of people? Are people the whole bodies or
just the brain? Is the brain just the gray mass or it's whole history of
nature and nurture? All the way to the big bang? Could it be said that the
mass of 1GB of data is the mass of the whole universe, since you need humans
to give meaning to data and you need universes to support human brains?

I have only more questions for you.

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audyyy
The internet doesn't weigh anything, Jen.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRmxXp62O8g>

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photon_off
It seems entirely possible to "store" data in ways that are not dependent on
things that are traditionally said to have weight. For example, you could
stream data as electromagnetism, making how much it weights completely
dependent on your definition of "weight".

Imagine streaming the entire internet into outer space with a pulsating laser.
In transit, it would weigh very near nothing (IANAP, but it's weight would
probably be the mass-equivalent of the total energy of the photons), but could
still be read at a later time.

------
sabj
Ah, but this is just a consideration of the data as it is stored in the medium
itself.

What about the weight of all the electrons necessary to do a read-state of the
internet wherever it might be encoded or, perhaps better still, the peak
transit rate of the internet in regular use - how many bits are being
transmitted and what do they weigh as they actually move, rather than relying
on arbitrarily chosen storage media as our determinant.

