Tons of data out of the Ship

Kristoffer Nes Langemyhr   |  General  |  30. Mar 19:02

Have you ever thought about how much the data transferred out of the ship weighs? Well, Chief Tech:Server, Steinar H. Gunderson did the calculations.

The data transferred out of the Viking Ship is light, which doesn't really have any mass, only energy of movement. On the other hand, light has energy (given by the formula E = hf, where h is Planck's constant), and by using this formula for rest energy; E = mc², we can find a kind of equivalent mass for a given amount of energy by m = E/c² (where c is the speed of light in vacuum).

The laser that is in use has 850nm, which gives a frequency of f = 353 THz. The exact amount of photon needed to represent a bit is a little uncertain, but in practice we can safely assume that it's required at least one. This kind of transfer uses the so-called 10/8-encoding (10 bit is used to transfer 8 data bits), which means we can safely assume at least 1.25 photon. Further on we assume that we will transfer about 1PB over the Internet link (this is a lot more than earlier, but so is the Internet link) this year, which brings us to this calculation:

8 bit/byte * 10^18 byte * h * (c / 850 nm) / c^2 = 2.6 * 10^-17 kg = 26 femtogram

Or, as the question was 'how many tons': At least 0.000000000000000000026 tons of data will be transfered out of the ship during this Easter.

The original question was asked by May Liss at Nettavisen net meeting (norwegian only).

Text: Steinar H. Gunderson, Tech:Server-chief The Gathering 2010.

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