A new way of examining the size of the IPv6 address space

Ok, you’ve probably heard the usual examples for visualizing how big IPv6’s address space is. 7 IP addresses for every atom of every person on Earth gets the point across, but it’s not exactly very useful… so I decided to try something more practical.

Since I like to do my experimentation in a Python interactive interpreter, I’ll share the raw shell session. First, let’s get some data to work with:

>>> people_on_earth = int(6.5e9) # 6.5 billion (approximately)
>>> ipv6_range = 2**128 # 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456
>>> habitable_planets_in_our_galaxy = int(30e6) # 30 million. An estimate from a SPACE.com article I read recently.
>>> cells_in_the_human_body = 10**14 # 100 trillion (Estimate from Science NetLinks via Ask Yakoo!)


Ok, now that we’ve got some frame of reference, let’s see if we can show how huge IPv6’s address space really is. First, there’s the traditional “addresses per person” count:
>>> ipv6_range / people_on_earth
52351133372452071302057631912L

Ok, what if we became galactic conquerors and put 6.5 million humans on every Earth-like planet in our galaxy?
>>> ipv6_range / people_on_earth / habitable_planets_in_our_galaxy
1745037779081735710068L

Oh! We mustn’t forget that some people have lots of computers…
>>> ipv6_range / 4 / people_on_earth / habitable_planets_in_our_galaxy
436259444770433927517L

Nor should we forget the little wireless gizmos like cell phones…
>>> ipv6_range / 16 / people_on_earth / habitable_planets_in_our_galaxy
109064861192608481879L

Hmm… Looks like it’s time to bring out the sci-fi “big guns”. What if every person was host to a colony of Internet-connected nanobots… one for each cell?
>>> ipv6_range / cells_in_the_human_body / people_on_earth / habitable_planets_in_our_galaxy
17450377L


Ok… what if we also had… The T-1000 Butlernator? (assuming 3 per person)
>>> ipv6_range / cells_in_the_human_body / people_on_earth / habitable_planets_in_our_galaxy / 4
4362594L


And in case you’re lost, that number shows how many galaxies could sustain such IPv6 usage before we’d run out. Enjoy!

A new way of examining the size of the IPv6 address space by Stephan Sokolow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.