The Internet Weighs About as Much as a Strawberry | Hacker News Reader

The Internet Weighs About as Much as a Strawberry

techland.time.com

36 pointsedwardy2016 comments

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.

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

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

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.

I don't think we can have an accurate "theoretical minimum mass" for information because it is highly dependent on our (incomplete) understanding of small particles.

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 . . .)

Not really.

Most NAND flash use floating gate-mosfets (a type of transistor), which work by storing a very small amount of electricity within a high resistance material to prevent dissipation when in the "on-state". But this charge is extremely negligible in terms of mass, and energy. And depending on the particular memory used, the "off-state" could carry a charge as well.

Interesting to think about though.

(and to clarify, this energy is coming from the device's battery, not the RF energy or something else OTA)

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.

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.

It comes from the battery! Which gets charged by the wall outlet, and so forth. Consider the "kindle weight" as independent from the battery's weight.

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

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

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.

Given the steady increase in population, I suspect those two lines, while going in the same direction (deeper into quadrant 2 of an x/y graph), are divergent; and, given the number of people on the planet when the internet was created, they never intersected.*

* yes, I understand that mathematically the two functions likely intersect at some point; however, the function for the mass of the internet and the function of the mass of the human race are meaningless that far in the past.

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.

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.

It's evil, don't touch it!

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com