When the internet was created did it result in any definable substance? Is there anything out there that could be put on a scale and said to have mass?
I’m not talking about the hardware that serves the internet. We all know that computers, servers, modems, etc. have mass.
I almost hope that this is a stupid question but I post it on the slim chance that there is actually something to it of which I was not aware. Just trying to fight ignorance.
Follow up question: Does that mass disappear when a server turns off?
All that hardware IS the internet, along with your computer and mine. You should probably add the mass of all the cable between systems, too.
If you don’t like that answer, then it basically comes down to whether a full hard drive weighs more than an empty one. I don’t know that answer for sure, but I don’t think it does.
Probably not. If you randomized all the bits on all the servers that held web pages, the mass of everything resulting would be the same. And most of the information is transmitted over fiber optic cable and photons are massless.
The closest you could come to a definitive answer is “How much would the memory to store all the internet weigh?” And you already said that you don’t want that value.
I don’t see how it would. When you write to a hard drive, you’re only changing the state of the substance that’s already there. Other than dust, over time, you add no new substance to magnetic disc storage, ever.
Can I throw sumthin’ atcha?
As time and technology progress, electronics get smaller and smaller. Thus, the ‘physical mass’ of the internet theoretically gets smaller and smaller.
However, with the proliferation of the Internet into new hardware, through mass production that weight may be boosted simply because more and more hardware items would become “Internet capable”.
So, I will hypothesize that there’s a theoretical constant weight of the Internet–it’s just a matter of finding out what it is.
Tripler
Oh, and this factors in the weight of cables, and the lack of weight of wireless items too.
Depends on where you define the boundaries. In a Free Body Diagram, all you care about as the Guzinta and the Guzouta.
If the defined boundary is the planet earth, we’re still the same relative weight as we were before the internet was invented. (plus a few thousandths of a percent for meteor impacts)
If the boundary is roughly the size and location of the Google campus(es)…it’s quite a bit heavier.
You could probably use some shady String Model reasoning to come up with a conversion between information units and mass units, and thereby come up with a mass for the information itself. But that would first of all be very silly, and second of all be minuscule beyond imagining, even if you did calculate it.
I think information weighs around 10^-65 kg / bit. There’s a principle in information theory that discusses the ability to resolve uncertainty, so for instance there’s a difference between having a lantern or two in your window and doing so after agreeing “one if by land, two if by sea”. The difference would be that the second case counts as information in a sense that the first one doesn’t. The distinction is the purpose. You could refer to the information content of the internet as being special because it serves the purpose of resolving uncertainty in ways we humans care about. If each human on earth has 1.5 terabyte of information networked together, there’d be 6e9 * 1.5e12 = 1e22 bytes or about 1e23 bits, weighing about 1e-42 kg.
I’m out of my depth here, by the way.
Read the link posted by ultrafilter, it explains the answer! 
And the answer is: 0.2 millionths of an ounce.
This link says
No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it.
So does this mean we have an Internet Weight Uncertainty Principle?
If IBM get their way it will weigh even less:
Project Kittyhawk’s goal is to explore the construction and implications of a global-scale shared computer capable of hosting the entire Internet as an application.
I disagree. The internet is the information and the media data… not the hardware it sits on. (at least in the context of the OP’s question)
Does information weigh anything?
The internet weighs about 3 gallons.
21 grams.
My search-fu for the boards isn’t great, but I’m pretty sure someone asked if data on a hard drive weighed anything a while back in GQ.
Sounds rather similar to the question of the body weighing less after the soul has left it. If so maybe that means we will have the internet in the next world. :dubious: