How does the internet work?

Have you ever wondered what happens when you send a message, watch a video, or play a game online? Do the signals just float through the air like magic? Join Mira and Finn on a mind-blowing journey to discover the secret, physical machine that connects our whole world—the internet! Get ready to be amazed because the internet isn't floating up in the sky; it is actually buried at the absolute bottom of the freezing, deep ocean! Discover how thousands of miles of underwater cables, some no thicker than a garden hose, carry your messages using super-fast laser beams. You will learn about giant buildings called data centers that hold millions of computers and are as big as one hundred and twenty-five football fields! We will even uncover some hilarious and wild secrets, like why deep-sea sharks sometimes try to eat the internet! Tune in to find out how your favorite games and videos travel across the globe in a heartbeat. It is an epic underwater adventure you won't want to miss!

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Welcome to Science Is Not Boring by Kidopoly.com. I'm Mira. And I'm Finn. Before we dive in, we have some incredibly special shout-outs today. A huge hello to Jonathan in Israel, who listens every single day and asked all about Wi-Fi and how it works. And a massive shout-out to Poppy who is six and Bo who is five in Petaluma, California. Poppy and Bo love listening and asked all about the internet. This one is for you both. I am so glad they asked, because I use the internet every day to play games and watch videos. But I have no idea where it actually is. It is the ultimate invisible machine, Finn. But what if I told you that the internet isn't floating around in the sky? It is actually buried at the absolute bottom of the ocean. No way! At the bottom of the sea! Does it get wet? Huh, well, the cables are waterproof. We always talk about saving our files to the cloud, which makes it sound like data lives up in the sky. But 99% of all the text messages, videos, and games sent between continents actually travel through heavy cables laying in the freezing, crushing deep ocean. That is mind-blowing. I thought it was all just magic signals flying through the air from space. Most people do, but the reality is a massive, planet-sized physical machine that we are going to explore right now. Wait, but when I use my tablet on the couch, nothing is plugged into the wall. How does my message get all the way to the ocean? That is exactly what Jonathan asked about Wi-Fi. When you tap send on a message, your tablet turns that picture into invisible radio waves. Oh, like invisible walkie-talkies! Exactly! Those radio waves bounce through the air in your house at the speed of light until they hit a small box called a router. I know that box. It has all the blinking green lights on the back. Right! The router acts like a translator. It catches those radio waves and shoots them into a physical wire that goes out of your house, under your street, and eventually connects to the massive ocean cables. That is wild! But how many cables are hiding in the ocean right now? There are over 500 massive cables crossing the oceans, stretching more than 900,000 miles in total. 900,000 miles? That is like wrapping a string around the entire Earth almost 40 times. You got it! And they dive incredibly deep. The deepest cables sit in ocean trenches over 26,000 feet below the surface. That is super deep. The water pressure down there would squash a giant military submarine like a soda can. How thick are these cables to survive that? You would think they have to be as thick as a giant tree trunk, but most of them are actually only as wide as a regular garden hose. A garden hose? How can all the videos and video games in the whole world fit inside something that skinny? Because they aren't sending physical pictures. They are sending light. Inside that heavy rubber, steel, and copper cable are tiny strands of glass called fibre optics. Wait, glass? Where in that snap if the cable bends in the ocean? It is a special, super pure glass, drawn out into strands that are thinner than a single human hair. It is so flexible, you can literally tie it in a knot. Thinner than a hair? Yes. And this glass is so pure that if the ocean were made of it, you could look down and see the bottom, thousands of feet away, perfectly clearly. Whoa! So what actually travels through the glass? Lasers shoot beams of light through those glass hairs at almost 200,000 kilometres every single second. So when I send a picture to Grandma, it is actually turning into a laser beam shooting under the ocean at the speed of light. Exactly! Let's take the famous Marea cable, which connects Virginia in the United States, all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to Spain. It is 4,000 miles long. How heavy is a 4,000 mile cable? The Marea cable weighs 10.25 million pounds. What does that even look like? It is the exact same weight as 34 fully grown blue whales. 34 blue whales? And they just unroll it off a boat? Yep. Giant specialised ships spend months slowly dropping the cable down to the pitch black ocean floor, leaving a glowing trail of internet data across the planet. Okay, so the laser light shoots across the ocean floor as fast as lightning. But where does it go when it hits land on the other side? It travels up onto the beach, underground, and into massive buildings called data centres. These are the physical homes of the internet. Are they just filled with regular laptops and computers? They are filled with hundreds of thousands of specialised computers called servers, stacked from the floor all the way to the ceiling in endless aisles. And the buildings are mind-bogglingly huge. Have you ever heard of the Citadel Data Centre in Nevada? No, I haven't. How big is it? It is 7.2 million square feet. Wait, how big is that in kid terms? Imagine taking 125 professional football fields and squishing them all together side by side. That describes the entire multi-building campus. 125 football fields full of computers. It must get so unbelievably hot in there. You are totally right. Computers get super hot when they work hard. The Citadel uses 650 megawatts of electricity. Is that a lot? That is enough power to run a whole city. The computers themselves use the most power, but a huge amount goes to giant air conditioners and massive water cooling systems to keep them from melting. Melting? If the computers melt, does the internet break? Exactly! If a data center overheats and shuts down, millions of people might lose access to their favourite websites, banking apps, or video games in an instant. What else can break the internet? With cables laying right on the bottom of the ocean, do sharks ever try to eat them? Actually, yes. In the past, deep sea sharks have been caught on video biting underwater internet cables. I knew it! Why do they bite them? Do they hate the internet? Scientists think the electricity flowing through older cables confused the shark's special electro sensors. Sharks can feel tiny electrical pulses from fish, so they thought the cable was a hiding snack. That is so funny. Did the shark turn off the internet? It actually did cause some damage. But now, engineers wrap the cables in Kevlar, which is the same super strong material used in bulletproof vests, so shark teeth cannot get through. That is smart. What if a huge ship drops an anchor on one by accident? That actually happens all the time. Ship anchors and heavy fishing nets cause 70% of all internet cable breaks around the world. Whoa! What happens when a cable snaps in half at the bottom of the sea? Special robot submarines called ROVs have to dive down into the freezing dark water. They grab the broken ends and bring them up to a ship on the surface, where human engineers perfectly splice the tiny glass hairs back together. So cool! Next time I send a message, I am going to picture it dodging sharks, zooming as a laser, and landing in a giant freezer full of computers. Alright, Finn, it is quiz time. Are you ready? Okay, I am ready. Bring it on. First question. How thick is a typical underwater internet cable? Next one. What does the internet data travel as when it moves through the glass fibre optic cables? Question three. How much does the massive Marea internet cable weigh measured in blue whales? Here's number four. What type of invisible waves does your Wi-Fi use to send information to the router? Last question. What are the giant buildings called that store all the computers and internet information? Great job! Let's see how you did. The first answer is it is about as thick as a regular garden hose. For question two, it travels as pulses of light or lasers. Number three, the answer is it weighs as much as 34 blue whales. Question 4. Wi-Fi uses radio waves, just like invisible walkie-talkies. And the final answer is they are called data centers. I can't believe how physical the internet is. It is not just floating in the air. Nope, it is millions of miles of glass, lasers, and giant computer buildings. If you guys love learning about the hidden internet and cable biting sharks, please leave us a five-star review. Yes, just scroll down on your podcast app and tap the five stars. It helps us reach more curious kids. Oh, and don't forget to check out our site kidopoly.com. We have tons of awesome learning games and activities waiting for you there. And if you want to shout out on the show, or just want to tell us your favourite internet fact, email us at hello at kidopoly.com. We love hearing from you. See you next time on Science is Not Boring. Bye everyone!