On 11/14/2010 08:42 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 12:42:38AM +0100, Romain Riviere wrote:
>
>
>>> Who knows, a /56 is a BIG space, yet if we start handing out /56 space to light switches then perhaps we are back at square one?
>>>
>> Except that there are 2^56 /56 prefixes, roughly 10 million
>> times the world population. I don't see exhaustion looming over the 35-year horizon just quite yet :)--
>>
> I beg to differ. Dust mote sensor networks can easily be in
> excess of billions or trillions devices.
>
>
Hi,
I followed your discussion and thought above numbers justify a small
thought-experiment. I'm not a physician, but you're a chemist, and will
therefore be able to correct the mistakes I'll make in the following:
According to Wikipedia, world energy consumption in 2008 was 474
exajoules. Now take 2^56 nodes, and you have 0.001827 kWh or 1.827 Wh
or 6578 J energy per node per *year*, ~ 200 uJ/s , which is unlikely to
be enough even for future dust mote sensor networks. In the real world,
with IPv6, the limiting factor isn't address space anymore, it's energy.
Or put in more drastic terms, long before we've run out of address
space, mankind will be starved or frozen to death, since we'd allocate
each and every Joule of "available" energy to some kind of computer system.
> Moreover, the solar system is pretty big. Add self-replicating
> hardware, and suddenly 128 bits and 35 years don't appear
> that much.
>
Wow, assuming self replicating hardware, why not also assume self
replicating address space, just to put your mind at ease? ;)
regards, Johann
Received on Tue Nov 16 17:14:56 2010