How Much Does the Internet Weigh? About as Much as a Strawberry
- Posted on November 5, 2011 at 1:00am by
Liz Klimas
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Although most of us probably think of the Internet as this glorious thing that floats around taking up no real space or weight in our reality, but now we’re being told that it actually does have a weight. And it’s about as much as a strawberry.
The Daily Mail reports that recently a mathematician — John D. Kubiatowicz, a computer science professor at University of California, Berkeley – was able to prove that when you downloaded books to your e-reader, you actually added a small amount of weight to it:
[...] due to the energy ‘gained’ by electrons when they store information, and the weight of that energy.
Filling a Kindle with books causes it to gain an infinitesimally small amount of mass – so small that it gains 100,000,000 times more when you recharge the battery.
Using this same logic, a YouTube video was developed calculating the weight of the Internet as a whole:
As the creator of the video notes, this weight of a strawberry includes the weight of the electrons in the electricity that runs the Internet — not our individual computes that access it. If we were going just based on information stored on the Internet, the Daily Mail notes, it would only weigh about as much as a spec of dust.
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Comments (70)
midnightgolfer
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 10:08amno.
Report Post »scoter
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 10:06amhttp://www.helpfireobama.com Please give $20.12
Report Post »JerryNic
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 9:57amAs my older brother used to say, straw-fall-bell-fairies.
Report Post »olsparkee
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 9:56amI knew that the trolls enter most of the racist comments but this is the first time I saw a troll write the original article.
What’s next, how to empty out the electrons when your computer “fills up” before it spills on the floor?
Report Post »YepImaConservative
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 9:16amIt‘s as heavy as a Strawberry except when there’s a Ron Paul topic on at any given time throughout the internet… then it’s as heavy as a re-gifted fruitcake.
Report Post »qpwillie
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 9:48amROTFL!!!! Yep.
Report Post »TxSon
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 9:06amBoth the weight and relevance of this story is imperceptible.
Report Post »Erabin
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 10:03amWrong. The weight of a strawberry is perceptible, in contrast to the relevance of this story.
Report Post »Sheepdog911
Posted on November 6, 2011 at 9:08amIs that a wild strawberry or commerical grade? I have wild strawberries in my yard, and they’re raely bigger that a pea. But I can buy them as big as a plum. Figures that something invented by Al Gore would be so ambiguous and open to great mis-interpretation and subject to lies and folk lore.
Report Post »ares338
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 8:30amDoes it come with shortcake?
Report Post »burnteye86
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 7:48amWow! This is so much useful information. I may as well just go on back to bed.
Report Post »TomFerrari
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 7:45amI like the Internet flavor. It’s all those seeds I can do without!! LOL
Report Post »gmoneytx
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 7:41amI think it weighs more like a peach.
Report Post »MommyNeedsMoreCoffee
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 7:45amAfter reading this, my first instinct was to check the date. Nope, not April 1st.
Report Post »sawbuck
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 8:41amhuh I would have guessed APPLE .
Report Post »YoungBloodNews
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 7:37amRight because all those servers are weightless…. The servers the HOLD the info, this is a NON STORY
Report Post »Lone Ranger
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 7:09amMmmmmm, strawberries.
Report Post »lukerw
Posted on November 6, 2011 at 1:10amLoL :)
Report Post »qpwillie
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 6:52amIf the internet is that light, why does my old computer have such a hard time picking it up sometimes?
Report Post »Erabin
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 10:04amBecause you suck at technology gramps ;)
Report Post »Secessionista
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 6:00amThis guy is an idiot. The internet is stored, by and large, on magnetic media, and doesn’t weigh anything. There are no electrons stored or used anywhere. They are used when data is transmitted.
Are these the same scientists that tell us the earth is getting warmer because of humans, lol?!
Never mind – he’s from CalBerk, so the answer to my joke-question is affirmative.
Report Post »Just_Bubba
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 6:30amSomeone needs to ask him how binary logic works. You don’t load a new set of electrons into the computer..they are already there and you are simply changing their state (from a 0 to a 1). For every bit turned on there is another that was just turned off. I would guess that it all cancels out unless you can prove that all data causes all bits to be equal to the same value. After it is all said and done who really cares? What a waste of bandwidth.
Report Post »Kraig Kent
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 8:24amJust Bubba – Thanks for saying what needed to be said. This story is a waste of so much more than just bandwidth.
Report Post »Starkadder
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 4:31amMy internet is conected to my home wia a fiber optic line, which wieghs significantly more than an electron.
Report Post »lukerw
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 4:46amThe Internet consists… of Super Computers… MainFrame Computers… ISPs… Satilites & Towers… Cable & Telephone Lines… Modems… etc… in the Billions of Tons. The problem is… Quantum Math… that looks at the Pico… attempting to explain the Universe… and as Einstein said: We need another System!
Report Post »knighttemplar999
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 3:14amI have often pondered the number of electrons in my poo as it spins round and round the toilet bowl. Is this the anti-matter that they speak of?
Report Post »Dustyluv
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 3:19amWe will send a researcher there to find out for you. You think a million or two in taxpayer funded grants will be enough to do the needed research? Obama has his pen ready to sign the check….
Report Post »Cosmos102
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 2:11amBerkeley is not stupid. Their professors know that humans are really the cause of Global Warming.
Report Post »TheObamanation
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 2:13amSince the Ice Age ? Really ?
Report Post »loupgarous
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 2:28amEnlighten me. During the Maunder Minimum, when the Earth was warm enough that Greenland really WAS green, and England warm enough to grow decent wine grapes, where was the anthropogenic component of THAT warming? You can’t tell me that the relatively small human population of the planet had burned enough carbon THEN to tip the ecological balance into warming.
Report Post »Brooke Lorren
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 2:57amI think that you’re getting the Maunder Minimum and the Medieval Warm Period mixed up. The Medieval Warm period was between the 9th and 13th centuries, and then Greenland was really green. It was followed by the Little Ice Age, which lasted until the 1860s. The Maunder Minimum lasted between approximately 1645 and 1715.
I’ve been maintaining a web site on this topic for a couple of years now: http://www.squidoo.com/little-ice-age
Report Post »Curious Visitor
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 3:05am@Loupgarous
I could be wrong but I thought Cosmos was being sarcastic. I will say though, and without trying to get into a huge “is climate change real” debate, that it‘s bad logic to say that because we have ’x’ incident when temperatures rose without human causes, that proves that humans CAN NOT affect the climate. It would be like saying because an earthquake shook a boulder off a cliff and killed my friend, it’s impossible that some sinister chap could push a different boulder over and kill me.
I also think you may have the Maunder Minimum confused with the Medieval Warm Period. I think it was during the Medieval Warm Period that Greenland was green and ice levels were low enough in the northern seas as to allow Vikings exploration of North America. The Maunder Minimum refers to a period within the Little Ice Age that followed the Medieval Warm Period, and many scientists believe it suggests a causal relationship between the extremely low incidents of sunspots and the unusually cold temperatures during that time.
Report Post »Curious Visitor
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 3:06amYou beat me Brooke:)
Report Post »Secessionista
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 5:53amI loved the headlines yesterday on Yahoo. A report came out saying we had increased out CO2 output by 6%. The head line read “Global Warming Accelerates at Alarming Pace”, of something stupid like that. Journalists have now been led to believe that carbon dioxide *IS* global warming, they are one and the same.
If our reporters are uneducated, it is highly unlikely our populace is educated.
Report Post »Erabin
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 10:12amLack of education and unironically posting on conservative websites seem to go hand in hand.
Report Post »loupgarous
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 1:59amGeez. I live 30 miles from Boulder, Colorado, which is the Midwestern equivalent of Berkeley (right down to the furry-legged coeds and intellectually bankrupt leftist politics of the campus and city council).
However, no one had better ever come CLOSE to accusing ME of being a liberal because I know Professor Kubiatowicz is likely right – electrons get heavier the faster they spin. If they didn’t, MRI wouldn’t work, nor a number of other things we take for granted every day. Now, the significance of the calculation is pretty small… given that this added mass is distributed over many, many TONS of server hardware, personal computers, wire and fiber optic cabling.
But thought experiments like this gave us nuclear energy, electronics and all the other things that make life such a buzz. We’re right on the politics, guys. We can afford to ease up a little bit on the good professor, he’s just having fun math geek-style.
Report Post »TheObamanation
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 2:09amSorry, THATS not gonna happen. The sleeping giant has awoken. They have nobody to blame but themselves.
Report Post »noelgreco
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 4:38amHey, I spent five years in Ann Arbor and I’ll put its furry-legged coeds up against Boulder‘s and Berkeley’s any day.
Report Post »gmoneytx
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 7:28amNOELGRECO the only reason they’re “furry-legged” is the cold weather…I kinda like the scratchy, scratchy…LOL, that was a joke!
Report Post »Dustyluv
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 1:48amJohn D. Kubiatowicz, a computer science professor at University of California, Berkeley is a parasite on society. He uses your tax dollars to do stupid things like this. I say we cut off all his funding and take all the money out of his bank account and give it to the rich to help pay their taxes that they have been robbed of.
When is crap research like this going to end?
Report Post »Curious Visitor
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 2:15amPlease detail what research you do and why it is quantitatively more useful than Mr. Kubiatowicz. I expect this report to include detailed proof that you have a full understanding of the entire body of work this one particular scholar. Also, kindly demonstrate how it is you know that the processes that contributed to this rather novel headline about the weight of the internet will never become part of future research that even you may admit is “useful”.
Report Post »Dustyluv
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 3:17amYou are right. I think I should get grant money, be tenured so I can sit around and do useless things that can NEVER possibly have an impact on anything ever so I can waste tax dollars too.
I am a productive human being. This is a waste of time and money and you insult people’s intellegence by such a stupid comment. I guess you do the same kind of useless research too. Maybe you weigh air? Maye you do that research to find out the impact of the sex life of the ameba when exposed to a fart?
Can you give me a detailed report of anything good that came out of Berkley in the last 10 years? No, this research really does not count…Like I said. IT IS A WASTE OF TAX DOILLARS!!!
Report Post »Erabin
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 10:10amDusty, you sound just like Palin saying that “research on fruit flies has never helped anything”.
And you’d be just as wrong.
But don’t worry, we need people who are good with their hands, and we are people who are good with their minds. There’s no shame in being the former.
Report Post »Snowleopard {gallery of cat folks}
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 1:31amIts more like trying to figure out the radius of destruction from the impact point of the landing of Michael Moore when dumped out of an Air Force Transport…say over Iran?
Report Post »TheObamanation
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 1:47amAfter he eats 200 times the weight of the Internet.
Report Post »mrsmileyface
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 10:50amIts nice to have our little dreams isnt it Snow. Too bad reality sets in fast.
Report Post »phillipwgirard
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 1:27amThey get paid to study this? TAX DOLLARS AT WORK.
Report Post »Californiasodbuster
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 1:18amIt’s like you need to take a bath or a shower after you drive through.
Report Post »Californiasodbuster
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 1:23amRemnants of bad LSD still linger after 40 plus years.
Report Post »Cold War Vet
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 1:13amI’ll give John D. Kubiatowicz the benefit of the doubt on his scientific observations, but being a Berkeley creature, his politics are on probation!
Report Post »Cold War Vet
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 1:10amMaybe, maybe not. Really does not matter. I just saw the “UC Berkeley” and the progressive alarms went off. Ever been there? That place is like ground zero for anti-American progressivism.
The campus and adjoining Shattuck Avenue is like this big negative-IQ void. It’s so liberal there, that you can actually FEEL it. It’s like you can feel your logic and common sense being drained…
And it’s right next to Oakland! Double the pleaure!
Report Post »lukerw
Posted on November 5, 2011 at 1:07amTruely… Berkeley is the home of the Stupid (the Internet for Radicals and Dummies)!
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