Dumb question...

[Nate Laverdure]

Originally Posted by martin417

Discover magazine did an article several years ago, called "How much does the internet weigh?". In the article, they assumed that a zero weighed nothing, and a one weighed however many electrons it took to store that value on a mempry chip. If I remember correctly, all the data on the internet weighed way less than one billionth of an ounce.

OH look, here's the article!

Forgive any misrepresentations, I didn't re-read the article, and I may have mis-remembered the facts.

I remember enjoying that article immensely when I first read it. If you follow the figures published there, you'll find that data weighs 6.4 * 10^-31 oz per kilobyte. This means you'll need about 1.5 * 10^21 terabytes of 1s and 0s to have an ounce of data. Interestingly, this article provides further figures and even suggests that the entire internet weighs about two ounces.

Now, if you consider that the entire universe is made of math, then you can imagine how much data we're all messing with every day.