In an earlier post I offered some perspective on just how big the 128-bit IPv6 address space is. The ridiculousness of the number of addresses offers plenty of opportunity for levity. Earlier today I was thinking about what other ways I could show the size of the address space in a way that was meaningful. Time seemed like a perfectly normal way to try and gain some perspective. Here’s what I came up with:
Imagine each of the 340 undecillion IPv6 addresses (340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) was a second of your day. If that were the case the total number of possible addresses would also be:
- Minutes – 5,671,372,782,015,640,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
- Hours – 94,522,879,700,260,700,000,000,000,000,000,000
- Days – 3,938,453,320,844,200,000,000,000,000,000,000
- Weeks – 562,636,188,692,028,000,000,000,000,000,000
- Months – 140,659,047,173,007,000,000,000,000,000,000
- Years – 11,721,587,264,417,200,000,000,000,000,000
- Decades – 1,172,158,726,441,720,000,000,000,000,000
- Centuries – 117,215,872,644,172,000,000,000,000,000
- Millenia – 11,721,587,264,417,200,000,000,000,000
Oh well, those numbers are still too ridiculously huge to give any real perspective. I guess the only thing they do is affirm that the address space is flippin’ huge!
Cheers,
Colin Weaver
