The Internet is huge, right? But does it really have any mass or weight? Huge server farms and long fiber optic cables certainly have weight, but I’m not talking about them. I’m not even talking about the information, pictures, videos, websites, social media posts inside the Internet. I’m talking about the information or data inside the Internet. Do these have any weight?
We know that energy is needed to store data or send it from one place to another. According to Einstein’s formula, energy also has mass. So theoretically it is possible to measure the mass of the Internet.
In 2006, a physicist at Harvard in the United States named Russell Seitz tried to measure the weight of the Internet. According to him, if we take the mass of the energy required to run the server, the Internet weighs about 50 grams. That is, it is equal to the weight of two or three strawberries. But the Internet has changed a lot since 2006. Earlier, there were no smartphones or 8K video streaming. Now it is the era of Instagram, iPhones and artificial intelligence. So now the Internet weighs even more. According to Russell Seitz, the Internet now weighs the same as a potato!
While Russell Seitz was trying to measure the weight of the Internet, Discovery Magazine was trying to find out the weight of the Internet in a different way. Internet information is written in bits. Bits are the smallest unit of information. Computers store them in the form of electrons. Each bit of information requires a certain number of electrons to hold it. The magazine estimated that in 2006, the total data flow of the Internet was 40 petabytes. 1 petabyte means 1015 bytes. According to the magazine, the total weight of the electrons needed to hold the Internet’s information would be only 0.000005 grams! That is, just one part of five millionths of a gram. To put it more simply, it is equal to the weight of a drop of strawberry juice.
But are these calculations correct? Another new study says that previous calculations are not entirely correct. Scientists say that the first calculation of the weight of 50 grams is wrong. And the second calculation, which means ‘equal to a drop of strawberry juice’, is also not correct. It may not be the weight of the data inside the internet, but rather the weight of the data being sent.
