Ask HN: How much does the Internet weigh?
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?
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-...
[3]: http://techcrunch.com/2008/01/09/google-processing-20000-ter...
[4]: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=16%2C000+kilograms
2 oz, apparently.
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.
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.
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.