Since its inception in 1960, the Internet has transformed from a military experiment into a giant living organism filled with oddities and subcultures. With the World Wide Web launched 24 years ago, the Internet has witnessed explosive growth in technology, business, and culture.
Below are some of the strangest facts describing the Internet and the World Wide Web.
1. The Internet requires about 50 million Horsepower for electricity
With an estimated 8.7 billion electronic devices connected to the Internet, the amount of electricity required to run the entire system for a single day is enormous. According to Russell Seitz and Michael Stevens' calculations, it would take a 50 million HP engine to generate the electricity needed to keep the Internet online.
2. It takes 2 billion electrons for a single Email message.
According to Michael Stevens and his calculations, a 50 kilobyte email message uses the footprint of 8 billion electrons. The number sounds huge, but electrons weigh next to nothing. 8 billion of them weigh less than one four-trillionth of an ounce.
3. Of the 7 billion people on planet Earth, 2.4 billion use the Internet
Most of these calculations cannot be accurately confirmed, but statistics indicate that 2 billion people use the Internet and the World Wide Web on a weekly basis.
4. The Internet weighs as much as a strawberry
Russel Seitz is a physicist who has discovered some very precise numbers. According to Seitz, the billions of billions of electrons that make up the data that travels on the Internet weigh about 50 grams. That's the weight of a strawberry.
5. Over 8.7 billion machines are connected to the Internet.
Smartphones, tablets, desktops, servers, wireless routers and hotspots, car GPS units, wristwatches, refrigerators and more: the Internet is made up of billions of gadgets. We expect that to grow to 40 billion gadgets by 2020.
6. Every 60 seconds, 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube.
… Of those 72 hours, most are cat videos, Harlem Shake dance moves, and stupid things that no one is interested in. Whether we like it or not, people love to share their amateur videos in the hopes that they will go viral, and become famous.
7. Electrons only travel a few tens of meters before stopping.
Yes, an electron doesn't travel very far through the wires and transistors in our computers. It travels perhaps about twelve meters, and then its energy and signal are transferred to the next device in the network. Each device, in turn, transfers the signal to its neighboring set of electrons, and the cycle repeats itself in the chain. This self-consumption occurs in fractions of a second.
8. The 5 million Terabyte Internet has a volume smaller than a grain of sand.
Imagine the mass of data on hard drives and transistors, put together 5 million TB and the mass would be smaller than a grain of sand.
9. Over 78% of North Americans use the Internet
The majority of Americans use the Web as a daily part of their lives.
10. 1.7 billion of Internet users are in Asia
More than half of the web's normal population resides in some part of Asia: Japan, South Korea, India, China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore. All of the above countries have very high adoption rates. However, while there is a growing number of websites written in Asian languages, the dominant language of the web continues to be English.
11. The best-connected cities are in South Korea and Japan
According to Akamai, the global internet infrastructure of cable and wireless is fastest in South Korea and Japan. The average bandwidth speed reaches 22 Mbps, far above the United States, where the average reaches 8.4 Mbps.
12. Over half of web traffic is for streaming and file sharing
Sharing or distributing music files (see P2P), movies, software, books, photos, and other digital data takes up a lot of bandwidth. Streaming videos from: YouTube Netflix, Hulu, and Spotify also takes up a lot of bandwidth.
13. Websites – Online Dating businesses earn over 1 billion dollars a year.
According to Reuters and PC World, the statistics on the profits of online dating sites in the US are very high. Using the World Wide Web for love, friendship and romance comes at a high cost.
