How Much Does the Internet Weigh?

How much does the internet weigh? Well, what does that mean? How do you measure information?

Well, we know that information is comprised of binary code. Binary code only exists because electrons activate transistors in chips, and electrons have mass, albeit very small. In the world right now, there are around 75-100 million servers keeping the internet running and combined they use up to 40 billion watts of electricity. One watt is 10 to the 18th electrons per second, so we can calculate that the internet is around 50 grams of electrons in motion. However, things get more interesting and complicated.

The horrendous math that we just did only accounts for the information stored in internet servers around the world, but how much does all the information on the internet weigh? Eric Schimdt, then CEO of Google, estimated that the internet has over 5 million terabytes of information. For those of you who do not know, 1 terabyte is equal to 1000 gigabytes. Now we have a number to work with. We know how many electrons there are in a byte and how much an electron weighs, so ,with a lot of math, we can calculate that the internet weighs about .2 millionths of an ounce. If you can't comprehend how small that number is, think of it like this, every email you have ever sent, every comment you have commented, and every article you have ever read, including this one, has the same weight as the smallest possible grain of sand.