Weighing the Web

Britannica Blog complains last October's Adamant  essay, Weighing the Web has been copy catted by How Much Does The Internet Weigh ? , but I'm scarcely piqued Discover 's 100 Top Science Stories of 2002 issue celebrates my work on jade archaeology. Discover's Steve Cass insists they  

 "scanned technical databases, tore through reference books, Googled like crazy, and checked with experts. It soon became apparent that if we wanted an answer, we were going to have to work it out for ourselves, as no one else appears to have tackled this question before.  So we put our thinking caps on and set the coffee machine on extra strong."

It must have been decaf. Googling How much does the internet weigh? still yields four Page 1 links to :

WEIGHING THE WEB

The Internet weighs two ounces .

             ( Originally posted 25 October, 2006)

Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard's comparison of his home energy costs to Google's multi-gigabuck annual power bill is intriguing. $1,200 a month is rather a lot of Pacific Gas & Electric.

But like Al Gore's 22.6 Megawatt hour a month Eco-mansion , it only serves to make the $3 a year per capita it takes to power the global internet seem a roaring bargain, even by third world standards. Still, my dollar a day ISP bill gives me no joy , because the electrons I feed my pet laptop are costing me about half a billion dollars a pound. Let me explain.

I'm taking about the power that drives the bytes , not lights the lights. Geodesic dome guru Bucky Fuller baffled architects by asking how much their buildings weighed?  Not being paid by the pound , few cared , but  mass and energy matter more than ever in the aftermath of 9-11. Built like a Hummer on steroids , the Empire State Building shrugged off a  bomber crash in 1945 while the World Trade Center's economy model frame collapsed. So how much does the internet weigh ? And how many horsepower does it take to run it ?

While the original  DARPA net  was built like a tank to survive a thermonuclear holocaust , much post-modern net construction is utterly gossamer, all air and microwaves. But those channels lead  to boxes full of integrated circuits bearing labels that specify how much power they can handle, and solid state physics reveals what fraction of the silicon inside is abuzz with  electrons in motion , and how much sits idle. In short, you can do the math.

A statistically rough ( one sigma) estimate might be  75-100 million servers  @ ~350-550 watts each.  Call it Forty Billion Watts or ~ 40 GW.  Silicon logic runs at three volts or so, and as the electron's mass is 9.1 x ten to the minus 31 grams, an Ampere is some ten to the eighteenth electrons a second, and the average chip runs at a Gigaherz , fairly straightforward calculation reveals that some 50 grams of electrons in motion make up the Internet.

Applying the unreasonable power of dimensional analysis to the small tonnage of silicon involved yields  much the same answer. The flip side of Moore's Law is that as etched circuitry shrinks , the transistors within the silicon pizzas chip foundries produce end up weighing next to nothing. State-of-the-art 100 nanometer transistors run  a million trillion to a ton . So as of today, cyberspace weighs less than two ounces.

It's hard to be  more exact ,since devices vary in speed, but to get a handle on The Whole Web instead of just the suburbs we're wired to , try tripling that figure-there are maybe ten times more mostly idle CPU chips in PC's than servers, and fewer very busy ones in the world's comparative handful of supercomputers .

Each person alive today has six watts of computational power at the disposal of their twenty watt brain . Third Worlders  have trouble accessing claim their six watt share of the worlds computing  horsepower , but  wired  Americans or Japanese expend  more energy on surfing than thinking.Yet the net has more than electrons inside-- a lot of its wire and fiber optic infrastructure is shared.. Some cables crackle with live TV bandwidth while others slumber-- the mix of traffic is unpredictable , and cable trunks branch like trees.

It is easy to put a tape measure to this shaggy creature's backbone, but the length of its hairy nervous system is hard to guess at . It may take a staggering  four miles of copper wire to connect the average US home to optical broadband . With copper at three dollars a pound , that  25 pound wire to optical cable link makes ultratransparent glass  fiber a staggering bargain at ten times its weight in gold--it does the work of a billion times its weight in copper. Its almost infinite bandwidth has pared the web down to run impressively well on ten nanograms of electrons per netizen, a figure optical computing may alter little , for it takes electrons to make photons.

Just as well- if the net ran on recycled light , it would  be weightless as an IP lawyer's word. As matters stand , it takes a lot of force to horse those critical 50 grams of electrons around. This  message was brought to you by a few nanograms of electrons,  but when rush hour users race their silicon engines , fifty million horsepower is unleashed on the information superhighway. But hold your horses- that power bill ain't hay, and silicon  foundries are  devising ways to cut it down to size- a 68 watt server chip is in the works.

But what about quantum computation ? Though its future is dazzling , it may take a whie to accelerate into it . Singularity fans need  to think about  delay s due to restarting the clock on Moore's Law.

In the here and now, quantum computing is embodied in bench-filling  kluges that devour a fair fraction of a  horsepower  per Q-bit . Yet though it takes a while to teach a baby elephant how to run , once it gets going.........

Copyright  2006 Russell Seitz all rights reserved .

Comments

[Mike Wood]

Since much of the web today is carried on fiber optics, what is the weight of all those photons?

[John Burgess]

What? Doesn't every else live in a Faraday Cage?

Maybe that explains the dearth of trick-or-treaters....

[Pat]

You're talking about active computation -- the bits going through processors. How about the mass of stored data? All of the massive storage arrays the large net players have should account for something.

[Dan Ciruli]

1.21 Gigawatts!?!!? What was I thinking?

[Chris H]

Surely, you should only be counting the weight of the information itself. Just counting the weight of the electrons, which are one arbitrary part of the media doesn't seem right.

[Dick Davies]

Agree with Chris - I've forgotten my information theory, but it would make more sense to weigh the data on the Net rather than the power running through the hardware that makes it up.

[guanhua88]

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[Annerose]

These comments have been invaluable to me as is this whole site. I thank you for your comment.

[Mikolaj]

Well well well... Not bad, not bad... Can better? ;)
;)

[Piotr]

keep up the good work!
;)

[Jeremiah]

Photons are weightless - they travel at the speed of light.

[Daron]

I think both of these arguments are flawed.

(the following is similiar in thought many posters above)

To figure out how much the internet weighs should simply be the combined weight of the magnetism of all the hard drives that store the data.

Of course it depends on what part of the internet you're trying to measure.
A measurement of the 'the internet' in my mind is the data that comprises the internet and not:

- the data being sent around(too redundant and dynamic to calculate)
- the media doing the sending
- the power used to do all the sending

That being said, I can't find any info on the weight of magnetism. My gut says that it weighs less than the wieght of electrons. If magnetism is wieghtless then so is the internet

Thats my two cents.
RESPONSE
Inquiries into the weight of magnetism should be directed elsewhen.

[Ludwik]

ah non c bon

[Abhijit, India]

Shameless self promotion.

A long winded story, unreadable language and phraseology, bad methodologies, bad estimate. Entirely unuseful for the intriguing question at hand.
RESPONSE

Get back to me when you think of a verb.

[Sprawn!]

Not to be a jerk, but... what the heck! The B-25 that the Empire State Building weighed 1/10 as much as the 767s that hit the WTC. It was also traveling at something on the order of 100 mph versus ~500 for the 767s. Using Newton's Law (which I don't recall quite perfectly) we can see that the 767s delivered roughly 250 times as much energy impacting the WTC than the B-25 hitting the Empire State Building. The crashes are not really comparable.

[Lee]

A different way to calculate this is take 40 GW * 24 hours * 3600 sec/hour
= 3.456 x 10^15 J of energy. Then, using Einstein's famous formula E = m c^2, the equivalent mass is 0.0386 kg or about 37 g.

[acai berry diet]

Wow gigawatts :|

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