Late Night Heavy Thoughts

The current temperature of the universe is 2.72548 Kelvin.

By Landauer's principle, the minimum amount of energy required to erase or alter one bit of information is kT ln(2), where k is Boltzmann's constant and T is the temperature in Kelvin. At 2.72548 K, this energy is approximately 2.6 x 10^-23 Joules.

By Einstein's mass-energy equivalence, E = mc², this energy corresponds to a mass of approximately 2.9 x 10^-40 kilograms.

According to the IDC, the total amount of data stored on the internet is approximately 79 zettabytes (7.9 x 10²² bytes, or 6.32 x 10²³ bits). The total mass of all that information is approximately 1.83 x 10^-16 kilograms. This is the mass above and beyond the mass of the physical media on which the information is stored. The mass of the information is negligible compared to the mass of the physical media, but it is not zero. (A full disk weighs a tiny bit more than an unformatted one).

The entire internet - Wikipedia, the cat videos, porn, instagram, etc. - weighs about 183 femtograms, which is roughly one-fifth the mass of a single typical bacterium.

passes the doobie...