Archive notice: This article was originally published on February 15, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Computers process all data — whether emails, documents, video clips or websites — in binary numbers: ones and zeros. ‘1’ means ‘power on’, and ‘0’ means ‘power off’. Information is stored using electricity in the smallest units: ‘bits’, which have a mass — albeit a tiny one. An average email contains around 50 kilobytes of data. Because one byte contains eight bits and 1,024 bytes make one kilobyte, it can be calculated that a typical email consists of 409 600 bits. Around half of the email bits are ones, the other half zeros. Electricity is needed for storage only for the 204 800 ones. Eight billion electrons are required to process them. Electrons are among the lightest particles: one electron weighs 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 9 (or 9 x 10-31) kilograms. A 50-kilobyte email therefore weighs one 18-quadrillionth of a kilogram. Daily internet traffic is estimated at around 40 petabytes. That is 40 x 1015 bytes: a 4 with 16 zeros! If it were assumed that the entire data stream consisted only of emails, the example would analogously produce an ‘information weight’ of 0.7 x 10-8 kilograms. In other words: the data flowing through the WorldWideWeb each day weighs a combined one 14-billionth of a kilogram! Even a grain of sand only 0.063 millimetres in diameter weighs more.
