Running out if IP Addresses
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(Diversion from the usually wierd stuff to the wonderful, er at least interesting) Apparently, so we created IPv6, which has 2^128 addresses, or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 available addresses... To put that into perspective, there are roughly 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in the human body, and roughly 7 billion people on earth, so each person on the planet could have something like 7 IP addresses per atom... There are enough IP addresses to assign thousands of IP's per grain of sand on the earth. There are enough IP's to assign a network the size of IPv4 for every star in the Milky Way with plenty left over for our nearest neighbor universe. There are enough IP's to give every millisecond since time began an IP address... So I'm pretty sure we've future proofed the IP network address scheme. I figure the working group discussing IPv6 was sitting around thinking "if we are going to future proof it, let's future proof the s**t out of it". Well played Allison Mankin[^], Scott Bradner[^], and the rest of the working group.