If all of the internet took up virtual land mass, how vast would it be?

Question

If all of the internet took up virtual land mass, how vast would it be?

Answer 1

This is very difficult to answer.  You cannot really easily convert the vast amounts of data stored online into surface area.   If we are simply talking how much surface area all the hard disks that store all the websites and information for the internet would be put together, I suspect it would not be much...considering we have 3.5 inch terabyte drives available now.  

However if we err...calculate stuff based on individual "web pages" and just pretend that each page is roughly equivalent or average out to say 8.5x11 inches (this is an over generalization since many webpages are long long pages where you scroll and scroll and scroll to get down the page).   But based on above...err...flawed data, and that claim in the news a couple weeks ago that Cuil has catalogued a "trillion" web pages....then the total surface area of these webpages....should they be printed out on paper and laid out flat on a surface would be: 699,095 square kilometers.  In comparison the Philippines' entire land area is 298,170 square kilometers.

Answer 2

All of the internet hardware, computers, routers, cables, already takes up space.

If you put it all together in one pile, it would be a big pile, but how big I don't know.  

Answer 3

There is no way to convert data to surface area.

Answer 4

I am a huge xkcd fan, and this topic appeared twice, so here are the links to them.  Read them.  And by the way, by internet, do you mean data available?

http://xkcd.com/195/

http://xkcd.com/256/