The internet is Very big. But does it have … actual mass? Large server farms and miles of fiber-optic cables are made, of course, but we do not mean Internet infrastructure. We mean the internet itself. The information. The data. The cybernetics. And because storing and moving things through cyberspace requires energy – which, every Einstein, has a mass – should, in theory, it is possible to calculate the weight of the Internet.
Back on Web youth days, in 2006, a Harvard's physicist named Russell Seitz make an attempt. His conclusion? If you consider the mass of force that runs the servers, the Internet comes out at about 50 grams – or about the weight of some strawberries. People are still using Seitz's comparison today. We all waste our lives on something we can swallow in a bite!
But many things have happened since 2006 – the Stram, iPhones, and the Ai Boom, to name a few. . Different methods. Internet information is written on pieces, so what if you look at the weight of the electrons needed to conquer those bits? Using all the Internet traffic – then approximately 40 petabyte – Descover puts the Internet weight in a small portion (5 million) of a gram. So, like a squeeze of strawberry juice. Wired wired it was time to investigate for ourselves.
First: the server-energy method. “Fifty grams is just wrong,” says Christopher White, president of NEC laboratories America and a veteran of the Storied Research Powerhouse Bell Labs. Other scientists have spoken to us to agree. Daniel Whiteson, a small grain physician in UC Irvine and Podcast cohost The extraordinary universe of Daniel and KellySaid that this is an extremely convenient way to get the “units you want” – as it is thought that the price of a donut can be calculated by dividing the total number of donats in the world of the world GDP. National! That will give us a doughnut-per-dollar figure, sure, “but it won't be right, or even close,” Whiteson said.
Discover the magazine calculation seems a bit on us. It has a lot to do with internet delivery, compared to the internet itself. It also assumes a set number of electrons needed to discode information. In fact, the number is incredible -differently and depends on the specific chips and circuits used.
White suggested a third method. What if we pretend to put all the data stored on the Internet, all the way -millions of servers worldwide, just one place? How much energy will we need to discode that data, and how much does that energy weigh? In 2018, International Data Corporation estimated that by 2025, the Datasphere of the Internet will be reached 175 zettabytesor 1.65 x 1024 bits. (1 zettabyte = 10247 byte and 1 byte = 8 bits.) white proposed reproduction of bits by a math term – kBT LN2, if you are curious – taking the minimum energy required to reset a little. (Temperature is a factor, because data store is easier in cooler conditions. That is: The Internet is lighter in space than Tucson, Arizona.) We can take that number, representing energy, and calling the E = mc2 to reach the total mass. At room temperature, the sum of the Internet weighs (1.65 x 1024) x (2.9 × 10–21)/c2or 5.32 x 10–14 Grams. 53 yan Quadrillionths of a gram.
Which … is not happy. Although it has no physical mass, the Internet still It feels like Weight, in the billions of us weighing its day -day. White, who had previously tried similar philosophical estimates, made it clear that in reality, the web was so complicated that it was “essentially unknown,” but why not try? In recent years, scientists have floated the idea of storeing data within nature building blocks: DNA. So what if we weigh the internet with those words? Current estimates Say that 1 gram of DNA can conclude 215 petabytes – or 215 x 1015 Byte – of information. If the Internet is 175 x 10247 Byte, that is 960,947 grams' worth of DNA. That is like 10.6 American men. Or a third of a cybertruck. Or 64,000 strawberries.
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