Editor's take: The internet is vast, sprawling across server farms, fiber-optic cables, and satellites. But beyond its physical infrastructure, does the internet – the data, the information, the very essence of cyberspace – have any measurable weight? The question might sound absurd, yet it's one that physicists and thinkers have pondered for years. After all, Einstein's famous equation, E = mc², tells us that energy has mass. And since storing and transmitting data consumes energy, it follows that the internet must, in theory, possess some infinitesimal amount of weight. The first serious attempt to quantify the internet's weight came in 2006, when Harvard physicist Russell Seitz made headlines with his calculation. By estimating the mass of the energy powering servers at the time, Seitz concluded that the internet weighed about 50 grams, or roughly the same as a couple of strawberries. The comparison stuck, becoming a quirky piece of trivia from an era when the web was still in its adolescence. But much has changed since then. Social media platforms like Instagram have emerged, smartphones are now ubiquitous, and artificial intelligence is reshaping the digital landscape. By Seitz's logic, today's internet might weigh closer to a potato. Around the same time as Seitz's estimate, Discover magazine proposed an alternative approach. Instead of focusing on server energy, they looked at the electrons used to encode information on the internet. Using 2006 figures for global internet traffic – about 40 petabytes – they calculated a weight of just five-millionths of a gram. That's less than a drop of strawberry juice. While clever, the method relied heavily on assumptions about electron usage and focused more on data transmission than storage. Nearly two decades later, Wired revisited these calculations with fresh eyes and modern data. First, they scrutinized Seitz's server-energy method. Christopher White, president of NEC Laboratories America and a veteran researcher from Bell Labs, dismissed the 50-gram figure outright, telling the publication that it was "just wrong." Daniel Whiteson, a particle physicist at UC Irvine, echoed the skepticism, likening it to calculating the price of a doughnut by dividing global GDP by the total number of doughnuts – a method that might yield numbers, but not accuracy. // Related Stories The Discover approach didn't fare much better under scrutiny. It relied on overly simplistic assumptions about how electrons encode information and ignored variations in hardware efficiency. The reality is far messier: different chips and circuits require vastly different amounts of energy to process data. White offered a more nuanced method for tackling the question. He proposed imagining all the data stored across hundreds of millions of servers worldwide consolidated into one place. By calculating how much energy would be needed to encode that data and then converting that energy into mass using E = mc², we could estimate the internet's weight more rigorously. In 2018, the International Data Corporation predicted that by 2025, the global datasphere would reach 175 zettabytes. Using this figure and factoring in temperature-dependent variables (data storage is easier in cooler environments), White arrived at a startlingly small number: 53 quadrillionths of a gram. In other words, if you weigh all the data on the internet as energy at room temperature, it would amount to almost nothing. While this calculation is mathematically sound, it feels unsatisfying given how heavy the internet seems metaphorically – billions of people spend hours each day navigating its vastness. White admitted that any attempt to weigh something as complex as the internet is "essentially unknowable." Still, he suggested exploring alternative frameworks for understanding its mass. One intriguing possibility involves DNA-based storage systems. Scientists have recently explored encoding data within DNA molecules due to their incredible density and durability. Current estimates suggest that one gram of DNA can store 215 petabytes of information. If we were to store all 175 zettabytes of internet data in DNA form, it would weigh approximately 960 kilograms – or about 2,100 pounds. That's equivalent to 10 average American men or roughly one-third of Tesla's Cybertruck. While we may never fully grasp what it means for something as abstract as the internet to have mass, these thought experiments offer fascinating insights into its scale – and limits. Whether you think of it as weighing less than a strawberry seed or as much as thousands of human beings encoded into DNA strands, one thing is clear: our digital world is both intangible and immense in ways that defy easy measurement.