
The Internet Weighs About as Much as a Strawberry - edwardy20
http://techland.time.com/2011/11/02/the-internet-weighs-about-as-much-as-a-strawberry/
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rflrob
Given the chain of connection between information, entropy, energy, and mass,
is that 0.2 millionths of an ounce number the theoretical minimum amount
information-mass of the internet, or is that the amount of mass our systems
use to store it?

Assuming that the internet contains 10^19 bytes (10 million terabytes, twice
the number given in the video), that's approximately 10^20 nats, which, when
you multiply by Boltzmann's constant (1x10^-23 J/K) and Room
temperature(3*10^2), is on the order of 0.1 J. That energy, divided by c^2,
comes out to 10^-18 kg, or about 10^-17 oz (give or take an order of magnitude
or two).

So I guess, really, the internet doesn't even come close to weighing as much
as the lowball estimate from the video.

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sukuriant
I presume you're using e=mc^2 here. That's not how e=mc^2 was meant to be
used[1]. And, this is using the actual mass of an electron: 9.10938188e-31
kilograms (Google)

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalence>

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rsaarelm
I think grandparent is talking about Landauer's principle which relates
information and energy, electrons aren't involved in any way.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle>

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sukuriant
Oh I see now, and it also looks like he's evaluating the data on the internet,
not the internet in motion, which was where the mass-of-a-strawberry idea
comes in.

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compman775
Um . . . when you download an ebook onto the Kindle, does the Kindle somehow
gain energy? Where would the energy come from? Wouldn't it just . . . come
from the energy already stored in the Kindle? If anything, wouldn't charging a
Kindle increase it's mass instead of downloading information onto it? (I don't
know, but . . .)

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electromagnetic
A charged battery is merely an imbalance of electrons. It's like a stored
water power system. You put water in a reservoir on the top of the hill and
open the tap and let it run into the reservoir at the bottom. When the upper
reservoir is empty, your system still has as much water as it did before it
just has no potential to generate power until you pump it back up the hill.

What they're saying is that the electrons captured to change the state in a
solid-state drive holds physical mass. If this mass change is extrapolated to
the data storage of the entire internet, then it physically ways as much as a
strawberry.

This likely means that all recorded data in human history would weigh less
than your standard package of printer paper from Staples.

~~~
gujk
Of course, if you wrote down all of knowledge on paper, and discounted the
mass of the paper and ink that holds the information, the actual information
content--the arrangement of the ink--weighs nothing.

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beej71
"Don't be silly, Jen--the Internet doesn't _weigh_ anything."

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDA1HUmuuJo>

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swombat
Think of what the world will look like when society (if it can still be called
that at that point) truly becomes "information-based", in the sense that the
weight of the information we exchange becomes larger than the biomass of the
human race.

~~~
kiba
Will the world be larger than planet earth? What about a Matrioshka_brain?

I think we're already building a jupiter computer. First, we're laying our
computing infrastructure on the surface of the earth. As time goes on, our
computational infrastructure increase in density and in efficiency.
Eventually, we figure out an unimaginable economic reason for building even
more computers, which increase our motivation. Thus planet earth is
geoengineered into a vast Jupiter brain.

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Twisol
The video itself actually says the weight of the electrons used to _serve_ the
Internet is about 50 grams. The actual weight of the information _stored_ on
the Internet is way less, closer to the size of a grain of sand.

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Metapony
It's evil, don't touch it!

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mY9Z5OPzE78>

