By Eddie Wrenn
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Type away: When you enter a website address, your query is translated into a numeric code - and now we have trillions (and trillions and trillions)
The internet has just received its biggest overhaul since creator Tim Berners-Lee first typed 'www.' into a computer.
Before Wednesday, we were running out of website addresses - not the easy-to-remember ones like www.ebay.com, but instead the numeric ones known as IP addresses.
These are the strings of numbers which give each computer or internet-connected address a long, individual number from which they can send and receive transmissions.
IPv4, as the old system was known, provided 4.3billion addreseses, which sounds a lot.
And it definitely sounded a lot when the internet was still struggling through infancy in the 1980s.
But with the rise of the world-wide-web, smartphones, tablets and the proliferation of computers across the world, the limit was reached - already at stretching point in 2008.
So now IPv6 - Internet Protocol version 6 - has come online, and brings with it 340 undecillion potential IP addresses.
If you want to see this in numbers...
THE INTERNET IN NUMBERS - MAKING A CONNECTION
Cells in the human body:
- 100,000,000,000,000
Number of litres of water on this planet:
- 1,260,000,000,000,000,000,000
Smallest estimate of all the stars in our universe:
- 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
Largest estimate of all the stars in our universe:
- 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
...Number of websites addresses available:
- 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456
So how many stars are there in the sky?
Frankly, we don't know yet - but from what we can see of the observable universe, we can make some estimations.
HOW DOES THE INTERNET WORK?
The old standard, IPv4, was structured like this: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, with each "xxx" able to go from 0 to 255 - that gave us out four billion addresses.
But now IPv6 extends the xxx to this: xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx and allows each x to be either a number 0 to 9, or the letters 'a' through 'f' - giving us a lot more flexibility with the star-beating potential.
If any canny-eyed readers wonder what happened to IPv5, it was invented - way back in the 1980s - but it was mostly to do with media-streaming, and never took off.
And current thinking - even if these numbers do look suspiciously similar - is that there is between 100 billion and one trillion galaxies in total.
This brings us up to a range of between 10 sextillion and 1 septillion stars, which if you want to see in naughts, your answer is above.
These estimates, however vague, are based on extrapolations based on the mathematics which estimate the potential mass of the entire universe, and what gravity within our galaxy tells us about the universe as a whole.
So, with only 30 years or so since the internet became reality, it already has universe-size ambitions.
Just a small portion: The colourful sight of the star cluster Omega Centauri, taken by NASA's Hubble telescope in 2009
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An endless pain for system administrators having to remember the new dot notation numbers.
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While I get this article is a bit on the light side, the comment 'it already has universe-size ambitions' is a bit silly. The reasons they've changed the system is so for all intents and purposes, there is no finite limit to the amount of addresses available. It's obvious that the new system will never get even remotely close to the limit with allocated addresses and that's the point of it. The actual number is irrelevant. The fact is just that there is no longer a limit as such, which was obviously a flaw in the original protocol implementation from a slight lack of foresight which can't really be blamed given that it was so early in the internet's infancy.
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Fascinating! Speaking of websites - since Martin Lewis sold his website last week, and was nicknamed 'Money Making Exert' I see someone has placed MoneyMakingExpert.co.uk for sale on eBay for £2.4million with a buy-it-now price of £9million!!! Perhaps he should buy it!
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Bob, Warwick -------- How do you know the universe is infinite, I'm sure all the scientists would like to know also. One popular theory is that the universe is finite but unbound (no corners LOL) . The article does say that nobody knows how many stars there are.
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Ah. the mysteries of the universe and the mystery of God!
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Hmmm, more addresses than stars in the universe, now considering the universe is infinite and the fact that we have no capability to see into every corner of the universe it would be safe to say it is either impossible to say how many stars there are or there are an infinite number of starts, and considering your article clearly states there will be 340 undecillion potential IP addresses it is therefore clearly apparent that once again your headline is a bunch of sensationalist nonsense. Congratulations for continuing to contribute to the dumbing down of society
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Wow finally, it sure took long enough. Even domestic appliances like fridges and central heating systems may have an IP address now for remote control when people are away from home. I would like to government data noobs attempt to store that lot on their databases lol.
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