[farktronix]

18 quintillion is much much bigger than you think.

The peak estimated birth rate on Earth was 173 million in the 1990s. If 200 million people were born every year and we gave every person a /64 block, we could allocate addresses for the next 92 billion years. The sun will be long dead by the time we use up that address space.

[jarin]

That's what we all think right now. They'll be laughing at us in the future when every nanobot needs an IPv6 address.

[farktronix]

No, really- 18 quintillion is a huge number.

92 billion years is a long time to imagine. Let's say we won't have a use for these addresses after the sun dies in approximately 5 billion years, so we're going to try to use them all up by giving every person 1,000 /64 blocks.

Wolfram Alpha gives the surface area of earth as 5e18 square centimeters. 2^64 is approximately 1.8e19. With a single /64 block you could put two nanobots in every square centimeter on earth. That's not really practical over the oceans, but whatever.

With 1000 /64 blocks, you could cover the earth with nanobots that take up only 0.05mm^2 of space each.

Pixels on the average computer display take up 0.055mm^2.

You could address a display that covered the surface of the entire earth with just 1000 /64 blocks, and you could make one of these display for every person born until our sun dies.

It's an astoundingly huge number.