The internet is large. Very large. It consumes all human knowledge and extends across the wide world to connect us, lets us share pictures of food, and allows us to view a plethora of cat videos. But one question that has always bothered me is, “how much does the internet eat?” To answer this question we need to make some guidelines. When I say the internet, I mean the information transferred between all the users in the world. So how much is that? Well, Cisco says that its about 167 terabits per second. So some quick google math says that this becomes about 1.83618×10^14 (1.8 followed by 14 zeroes) bits per second. WOW that’s a lot… What about in one year? A whopping 5.7905772×10^21 bits! Now this is an inconceivable big number. By comparison, the number of stars in the universe is around 6x10^22. So now we need to determine how much energy the internet uses. There are a lot of ways to define this but lets use the most interesting. Did you know that information itself contains energy? This is not as crazy as it seems and recently experimental physicists have actually extracted usable energy from information alone. The way to think of energy is in two parts. The first part is composed of what we all think of as energy like heat, lifting something or throwing a ball. The other part is called entropy or disorder. The way to think of entropy is to think about how many possible ways to order something. For example, the reason that people bet on a 7 when rolling two dice is because the 7 is always most likely to appear because there are more combinations of it on two dice than any other number. So how much entropy does a bit of information have? Well it’s just either 1 or 0 so there are only two configurations. The theoretical energy from this is called the Landauer’s principle where E=kTln(2). In this equation, k is some constant and T is the temperature. If we assume room temperature, the energy per bit is about 3×10^-21 Joules, which is extremely small. Now all we have to do is multiply to find the amount of energy the internet uses in information energy alone. Drum roll please… 18 Joules. That’s it! That’s small! Pathetic. Why even write this! To put it in perspective, a Big Mac has about 700Cal or 3,000,000 Joules of energy. So that delicious burger could power the internet for about 166,666 years, assuming the internet doesn’t get bigger (which it totally will).

Now don’t forget that we are looking purely at the information energy, and not including the heat, or mechanical energy needed to run the connections. So next time you gouge yourself on some awesome deliciousness, do it with a free conscious knowing that there are no starving internets in Africa that could eat for just a dollar a day.