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How Heavy Is the Internet?
An anonymous reader writes "Ever wondered how much the internet physically weighs? 498,438,559,990kg, according to CNET. To reach this figure, they added together public data on the weight of every computer, server and connecting cable. To this they added 6,075,000kg of iPhones, and over 6,800,000kg of Blackberries. Finally, they added the weight of 287,524 viruses and 85 billion+ webpages."
I just typed something, and made it heavier than that!
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
"How Heavy Is the Internet?"
Slightly heavier then the total weight of the worlds useless journalists.
the users...
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
0 lbs, 0 kgs. Duh. The internet doesn't weigh anything.
The internet doesn't weigh anything.
Why isn't this in idle?
If it's supposed to be serious, you have to amortize the weight of the equipment over its uses. A desktop that spends half its use playing solitaire, 1/4 of its use surfing the web, and 1/4 of its use spamming the world under viral control only counts for half.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
To add the weight of all the Tubes and Dump Trucks!
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
BOOM! POWZA!
I KNOW I couldn't throw that on the back of a truck.
/. has grown to despise on idle(why does it still exist?), how did it escape onto real /.?
Seriously though this is the shit
If that kind of weight is spread evenly then we are dangerously close to causing a global implosion. If one hemisphere gets too much technology then we may very well drift out of orbit and crash into another planet. This is what the Mayans were telling us, people.
When I saw the headline I was expecting kdawson's name attached. For shame.
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
Something this heavy... must be slow, right? Slow like this slow news day maybe? ... What do you mean, it's constantly getting faster? Are you nuts?
I've just removed the watercooling system on my PC so the internet weighs 10KG less now.
So its exactly 498,438,559,980kg now.
I need to know how much of the internet is 1, and how much is 0.
I suppose I could get a start on that by running VMs of the most popular OSs, and examining snapshots of each one, multiplying that by... oh, and do the same with backbone traffic... be a bit of a pain to handle all the embedded stuff, but in principle... well, in principle, the internet could be represented as a single number. I wonder if it's odd or even. I guess it depends on who has the last bit.
Ooops, time to takes me pills again.
Yo internet's so fat the only time it sees 90210 is on the scale.
Or less, if it is possible to have negative intellectual weight.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Ever wondered how much the internet physically weighs?
No.
And, oddly, even after someone else has asked the question, I still don't.
and I'm a pc, and we're here to*BOOM then silence as mac truck turns John Hodgson into a pancake*
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Well, I don't know about you guys but I actually get asked this question quite often. Just the other day I was in a board meeting when my CEO turned to me and whispered in my ear "Do you know how heavy the internet is?" I didn't know the answer and ended up looking like a fool.
Or the e-anus you have it stuck in.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Really exceptional that they managed to measure the weight to 11 significant figures -- 12 if that last zero wasn't from rounding. A tribute to CNET's diligence.
Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain. --Friederich Schiller
Given their methodology, you'd better add the weight of all the colocation facilities. That's a heap of concrete, lead-acid batteries, flywheels, generators, steel supports and cabinets, etc.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
It is a good thing they didn't try to calculate the amount of power used and how much it adds to global warming.. They may decide to shut it down tomorrow.
The truth shall set you free!
like the Dogberts and "beatings will continue" buttons and mirrors to see the boss coming up behind you?
add another 300,000 Kg at least.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
E = mc^2, hence m = E/c^2. How much energy is there in a running computer compared to one switched off? Convert to mass, multiply by the number of computers on the internet to get... well, yet another meaningless figure, but it might be fun to estimate.
Grams is a measure of mass, not weight. Take something to the Moon and it will have far less weight, but the mass will remain constant.
The internet gained about 6 billion pounds after the release of Windows Vista, due to all the additional beefier systems needing to be purchased in place of older systems.
It's far time the Internet went on a diet.
Oh WTF is with the supposition that Viruses or web pages "weigh" something?
It's already factored in by the weight of the hard drives of internet connected PCs... actually, that counts free disk space too.
Technically.. the entire weight of the PC is not all attributable to the Internet.
For example, the weight of the internet has nothing to do with the weight of that extra-large display you happened to have installed so you could watch DVDs on your computer.
The next stupid question:
How long is the Internet?
How wide is the internet?
and then calculate the area of the internet using standard units like football fields, or states of texas.
Um, what?
sic transit gloria mundi
*thank you* *thank you* - Don't forget to tip the waitress on the way out!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Let's just weigh the portions of human brains containing the abstract concept of the internet instead.
That's not nearly as f'ed up as you might think. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapheme-color_synesthesia
Ask enough people and I'm sure you can actually come to an appropriate answer to the question of just how red the number 7 is.
I'm wondering why the measurement is with the equipment at all. 'The Internet' isn't so much the hardware it's being run on, is it?
Wouldn't do much good if that hardware wasn't moving bits and bytes around.
So perhaps the question should be... how much data traffic is there for 'the internet' and, by splitting that up into electrons and photons (presuming wireless signals have no mass), how much does that weigh.
I wonder if that could actually end up being an appreciable amount if measured over the course of seconds/minutes/hours/days/a week/a month/a year.
Well, after this fluff piece, I would say the internet just got lighter.
How much does the Earth weigh? At first, you think just weigh up every object in the Earth, but you need to remember it has less weight the deeper it gets into the core, so I'm thinking you'll run into some Calculus there.
God spoke to me.
Can someone please convert this to some useful unit of measure like "Libraries of Congress"?
The Internet doesn't weigh anything. Just ask the Elders of the Internet!
You can't handle the truth.
The internet is a mass of data interconnected by address. Data is not an object, but the status of variables. Data has no more weight than any other abstract concept.
This knowledge seems about as useful as knowing the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow. I'll keep this in mind if I'm ever asked this question.
BTW, is this the African or European Internet?
If it gets much heavier the Earth might sink!!
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Finally, they added the weight of 287,524 viruses
When they make a statement like this, when no weight can be assigned to a computer virus, they pretty much completely discredit themselves.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I hope not :(
But, isn't the Internet electrons and light? The internet is not a wire, it flows in a wire.... so surely it's the mass of the electrons and light!
And of course they're more massive than you might expect due to relativistic effects.
498,438,559,990KG? What does that convert to in tubes?
Obviously this information is only really useful to someone attempting to work out the cost of posting the Internet somewhere
...and this would be useful? Ever?
That's a very precise figure for something that's just a rough estimate!
Surely "around 500,000,000 tonnes" is a better way to put it?
I can't find it on tineye... That's pretty cool!
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
the weight of the porn it carries.
Newer Cisco routers are measured in tons. I'm not actually kidding... The CRS model breaches 4000lbs, depending on how it's configured and optioned out. I don't know if the folks that did this considered the networking gear required to move packets from point A to Z, but that stuff isn't necessarily light weight.
jas
Jason Van Patten
...if they've discovered its shape yet.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
The episode of the IT crowd, where the protagonsists got a black cardboard box and put blinking lights on it, and fooled everyone into thinking it was "The Intenet"
Q: "How come there's no wires?"
A: "Because it'wireless!"
how much is this in vw beetles exactly?
if that's impossible it's also possible to get it in library of congress units, that might be easier to remember..
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Well, I don't know about the "internet", but the www has a positive buoyancy at earth normal pressure, due to the huge amount of hydrogen generated by the flatulence of most of the posts, such as this one. And really, how many web pages have you seen that were actually just crap? ; it all adds up. I say it is floating up in the ozone layer and blocking enough solar radiation to counteract global warming due to data center cooling.
The reason we subjugate ourselves to law is to better procure justice. If law does not accomplish this purpose then it m
How heavy is religion?
Inventor, Artist http://www.Rubber-Power.com
How heavy is a cloud?
You've got your answer. /mesnickers
Geez, use metric already:
labrat@yggdrasil:~$ units
2411 units, 71 prefixes, 33 nonlinear units
You have: 498438559990 kilograms
You want: petagrams
* 0.49843856
/ 2.0062653
1/2 petagram. Easy.
That's heavy.
Facts take all of the premium out of arm waving - T. Reynolds
iPhones and Blackberries
Talking of which, I'm saddened to see yet another media outlet pushing the myth that the only Internet phones in existence are the Iphone and the Blackberry (although I suppose we should be grateful they at least acknowledge the existence of the Blackberry, and don't pretend that the Iphone is the only phone in existence). Together they only make up a few per cent of the total figure. If they wanted to just pick on one set of phones, they should have chosen Nokias at 40% of the market.
"Quite a lot of iPhones have been sold, 42 million in total" - woo! Or maybe quoted the figure of 2 billion Java Internet phones.
Fair enough if this was the Daily Mail or something, but I expect better from a tech site like CNET. With a major blooper like this, the data is useless. It also seems pointless bothering about them anyway, since they make up about 0.0026% of the total! And then we have embarrassments like saying not owning an Iphone is "the modern-day equivalent of not having a head" - yes, I guess 98% of the Internet phone owning population don't have a head. Just because some Apple fans see it as a fashion statement, doesn't mean anyone else cares.
I really love slashdot, i come every day to this site to see something interesting, don't get me wrong i really love a good joke...but this post makes me sad, this is just stupid, shame on the poster.
think of it this way- in my house alone: ps3 wii 3pcs 2laptops internet enabled media player psp (2)(ds isn't online as it only supports wep) internet enabled blue ray player wifi enabled non blackberry phone I am sure that I am forgetting something, but according to the way that the #s are it would prolly register as 1 pc on the survey.
This is grossly inaccurate.
Mathematically speaking, how the holy hell did they get almost 500 billion kg? Those numbers add up to less than 25 billion kg (24,692,195,430 kg, to be exact).
Conceptually, they both included things they shouldn’t have and omitted things they should have included.
Devices which connect to the internet and suck information from it should not be included. Getting groceries from the grocer doesn’t make you a grocer yourself. Get rid of the personal computers and mobile devices.
Amount reduced: 22,850,386,120 kg, or almost 93% of the total weight (using the correct figure, not theirs).
On the other hand, the cellular infrastructure (cell towers and repeaters) which the mobile devices connect to should most definitely be included.
Amount added: unknown.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.