Hey, Vsauce. Michael here.
And this strawberry weights about 50 grams, which according to Russell Seitz also happens to
be the weight of the entire Internet. What does that mean?
I mean, the Internet is a gigantic place and how do you measure information?
Well, let's start a little bit smaller with a Kindle.
Right now, I'm reading Gadsby, which is a great novel that makes complete sense, except
it was written without ever using the letter "e," which is awesome.
But when I put Gadsby on my Kindle, did my Kindle gain weight?
Well, theoretically, yes it did. Information is stored on flash drives like
this and on my Kindle in binary. And that binary physically exists because
electrons charge floating gate transistors. And the thing about electrons is that they
have mass. In fact, a professor at Berkeley estimated
that when a Kindle is completely full of books, its weight increases by about 10 to the negative
18th grams. That number is mind blowingly miniscule.
In fact, he says that when you fully charge a Kindle's battery, it gains 100 million times
more mass than it does when you fill it with books.
But even then the number is impossible to measure.
The most specific scales we've ever created only measure to about 10 to the negative 9th
grams. So let's get bigger.
Russell Seitz came up with his measurement because the Internet is composed of networks
of servers and they're about 75 to 100 million servers operating to make the Internet work.
Combined, that many servers equal about 40 billion Watts of electricity and we know that
an Amp is about 10 to the 18th electrons per second.
And since we know the weight of an electron we can calculate that the entire Internet
is really just about 50 grams of electrons in motion.
Now that number only includes servers. And Seitz says that if you wanna include the
chips in personal computers as well, the number's about 3 times larger.
But there's a weight of the Internet that impresses me a little bit more.
It's a calculation not of the energy it takes to serve the Internet, but the energy contained
in the actual information. The videos, the pictures, the e-mails.
How much do they all collectively weigh when stored?
Well, here's the thing. It takes about 8 billion electrons to store
one e-mail. 8 billion sounds like a lot, but electrons
are tiny and so one e-mail only weighs about two ten-thousandths of a quadrillionth of
an ounce. But the Internet contains lots of e-mails
and it contains lots of video and images and celebrity rumours, so how much does it weigh
altogether? Well, the first question we have to ask is
how big is the Internet and that's difficult to calculate, but Eric Schmidt, then-CEO of
Google, once estimated that the entire Internet contains about 5 million Terabytes of information,
of which, he said, Google has only indexed 0.004%.
Okay, so not counting the energy it takes to deliver the Internet, the information itself
on the Internet is about 5 million Terabytes. Now, we know how many electrons it takes to
form a single byte and we know the mass of an electron and so with a little bit of math
you can figure out that the entire Internet, everything on it, collectively only weighs
0.2 millionths of an ounce. Think of it this way: every single video on
YouTube, every single video across the entire web, every single image, every single website,
every e-mail you've sent, every love letter you've written, every photo of your
grandkids you've received is collectively held within an amount of mass about the size
of the smallest possible grain of sand. If you follow @tweetsauce on Twitter you can
learn even more. I'm gonna share some more facts there that I didn't
include in this video around electricity in general.
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And as always,
thanks for watching.