Welsh hair-bits

If we put all the emails we have received on the subject of the number of addresses in IPv6 into a single database, it would be larger than... no, we can't get into this habit. But we do have a lot of them.

Phill Perryman starts us off this week: "If you put a pile of multiport doughnuts with five IP addresses each which was high enough to reach Proxima Centauri - 4.2 light years away - on every 10cm2 of the earth's surface, you would just about run out of addresses." Not to mention multiport doughnuts.

There's more: "If the world's population is heading towards 9x10^9 by 2050 and the sun is going to burn for at best 1x10^9 years, that leaves 3.5x10^19 IP addresses for each person for every year until the end of the world."

Paul Kerman at Cambrian Printers uses the thickness of a human hair and an area the size of Wales - "the standard units of measurement used by the media".
"Each square millimetre of Wales would have a stack of human hairs 16 trillion kilometres high - enough to span the orbit of Pluto," he says. Finally, a use for Wales! We're only kidding, Welsh readers.

While we're heading outwards: "If each IP address were represented by a distance of 1mm in length, the imaginary line connecting all those IP addresses would stretch to the edge of the visible universe," says James Morgan. "Not only that, but it would be able to make the trip more than 25 million times."

And looking ahead: "If IPv7 has addresses twice as long as in IPv6, that will give about as many IP addresses as atoms in the observable universe," points out Geoff Pickering, which would be a complicated DNS database.

We'll have even more IPv6 metaphors next week: anything using food, vegetables or copies of Computing is welcome.