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Title: Scientists Debate Actual Weight of the Internet

Link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/04/07/1740...

The internet's physical mass remains contested among scientists, with
estimates ranging from a strawberry to something almost unimaginably small.
In 2006, Harvard physicist Russell Seitz calculated the internet weighed
roughly 50 grams based on server energy, a figure that would now equate to
potato-weight given internet growth. Christopher White, president of NEC
Laboratories America, has dismissed this calculation as "just wrong." White
suggests a more accurate method that accounts for the energy needed to encode
all internet data in one place, yielding approximately 53 quadrillionths of a
gram at room temperature. Alternatively, if the internet's projected 175
zettabytes of data were stored in DNA -- a storage medium scientists are
actively exploring -- it would weigh 960,947 grams, equivalent to 10.6
American males. Though scientists debate measurement methods, White asserts
the web's true complexity makes it "essentially unknowable."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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