Neat. So, we can establish a lower bound, anyway. Let's start with one of the newer mini usb flash drives that you can get these days, which weigh about 1 gram

Neat. So, we can establish a lower bound, anyway. Let's start with one of the newer mini usb flash drives that you can get these days, which weigh about 1 gram per 5 GB [1]. For the amount of data in the internet, we can start with Google; in 2006 they were storing in the neighborhood of 220 TB [2], but by 2008 they were processing 20 petabytes per day [3]. So, just to invent a rough lower bound, let's say that Google processes the internet every two days, and that they're storing 50% of it, so that's roughly 80 petabytes on the internet, for a minimum weight of about 16,000 kilograms, or about 1/5th the weight of a blue whale, according to Wolfram-Alpha [4] -- as a lower bound. I'm sure it's really quite a lot more than that, but probably not much more than a blue whale or two. [1]: http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?p=STU32GPCG http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?p=STU32GPCG [2]: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/09/how-much-data-does-google-store.html http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/09/how-much-data-does-... [3]: http://techcrunch.com/2008/01/09/google-processing-20000-terabytes-a-day-and-growing/ http://techcrunch.com/2008/01/09/google-processing-20000-ter... [4]: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=16%2C000+kilograms http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=16%2C000+kilograms