The Weight of the Internet Will Shock You

The internet is massive. But does it have … actual mass? Big server farms and miles of fiber-optic cables do, of course, but we don’t mean the infrastructure of the internet. We mean the internet itself. The information. The data. The cybernetics. And because storing and moving stuff through cyberspace requires energy—which, per Einstein, has mass—it should, in theory, be possible to calculate the internet’s weight. Way back in the adolescent days of the web, in 2006, a Harvard physicist named Russell Seitz made an attempt. His conclusion? If you consider the mass of the energy powering the servers, the internet comes out to roughly 50 grams—or about the weight of a couple strawberries. People still use Seitz’s comparison to this day. We’re all wasting our lives on something we could swallow in one bite! Current estimates say that 1 gram of DNA can encode 215 petabytes—or 215 x 1015 bytes—of information. If the internet is 175 x 10247 bytes, that’s 960,947 grams’ worth of DNA. That’s ... Read full article.