This is a philosophical question. I realize that a computer virus is a set of instructions and has no actual weight. But ultimately it must be traced back to some physical basis, with a quantifiable mass. Otherwise, we're looking at another "ghost in the machine".
Tags: computer virus, philosophical question, ghost in the machine, computer, mass, weight
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It weighs no more than a lack of computer virus. Writing data to a hard drive does not change its weight.
A computer virus has no weight. A virus isn’t really a virus that gets your computer sick. Its just an intrusion your computer that may cause damage to your hard drives.
The data for a machine is a series of 1′s and 0′s that are interpreted by your computer to be lines of code that make up the program. The 1′s and 0′s are stored on your hard drive’s platters which do have a mass. You can quantify the weight of the virus by the actual weight of portions of the hard drive that the virus is contained on. The virus’s weight than would directly rely on the amount of bytes/sectors that the virus takes up.
The weight would also rely on the hard drive that the virus is on because hard drive density varies by the model of the hard drive.
I love philosophical questions.
Well, lets get just a little technical about it here for a minute. Lets ignore how much energy, time and materials went into creating it, because you asked how much the virus itself weighs, and only the end product is the virus. Lets also ignore the fact that there are millions of different viruses and each one is different in size and function and also in weight. I want us to also ignore one other thing WASTE. Every computer is different, some are more efficient than others due to pathways, conducting material, redundancy, etc. etc. So If we agree that the final result, we were to subtract the WASTE from the total weight of the product, it would more or less be equal across all machines.
The fact is, they do have a very real weight. Atomic weight. Even if one argues that Electrons themselves have no weight, they still have a energy from mass conversion E=mc² and it’s reciprocal to find the mass of the energy (Extra Geek note: ‘E’ is measured in Joules, ‘m’ is in kilograms and ‘c’ is speed of light in meters per second or 299,792,458 m/s) . In short, any code can be converted to a very real weight because it takes energy to run that code. Again, subtracting the lost energy caused by conductivity, pathways etc. etc.
100% efficient energy use converted to mass will give us a real weight.
Each virus has different code and so each virus will have it’s own unique weight, just like us.
Or we can simply pick up a copy of the “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” and learn that the answer is quite simply “42″.
I hope that answers your question, or was at least a bit fun.
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