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posted by CoolHand on Saturday April 25 2015, @06:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the no-need-to-worry-about-toner-usage dept.

Students from the University of Leicester ( http://www.le.ac.uk ) have calculated how much paper would be required to physically print the Internet as we know it — and have found that, despite the Internet's enormous size, less than 1 per cent of the Amazon rainforest's trees would be required to accomplish it.

In order to work out how much paper would be required to print the Internet, students Evangeline Walker and George Harwood from the University of Leicester's Centre for Interdisciplinary Science investigated how many trees would be needed, using the Amazon rainforest as an example given its unprecedented scale on Earth.

The Amazon rainforest, situated in South America, is the largest rainforest on Earth, spanning 5.5 million square kilometres and housing approximately 400 billion trees.

The students used the English version of the popular website Wikipedia as an example of a website containing a large amount of data. They took ten random articles from Wikipedia, which provided an average of 15 pages required to print each article. They then multiplied this by the number of pages on Wikipedia alone — estimated to be roughly 4,723,991 at the time of writing — which resulted in 70,859,865 paper pages.

Applying this to the Internet at large, the students suggest that approximately 4.54 billion pages of paper would be required to print the Internet as we know it.

http://phys.org/news/2015-04-amazon-rainforest-internet.html

[Paper]: http://www.physics.le.ac.uk/jist/index.php/JIST/article/view/100/57

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @07:05PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @07:05PM (#175125)

    Honestly we need newer technologies for structure organization and storage. This applies to both data and energy which extends into all sectors. These people are getting press time for doing nothing of value for anyone. I keep seeing horrific stories of bad laws, bad science etc. I wish there would be more breakthroughs in how to make roads, how to handle water and food supply and how to effectively set up structure for complicated operations like business.

    I'm scanning most of these sites not looking for 'news' so much as tools and operation.

    I doubt anyone will read an AC, however I do wish that the editorial staff was more aware of why people come here, it's not always because we are low and require our jerry springer fix.

    It's been sites like this that gave me my first blurry edged view of what a web server was, and things like nodeJs when they make the headlines. I immediately scooped up and began learning and using these technologies because you can get practical things done with them like facilitating a financial transaction etc.

    I don't like necessarily watching dry youtube videos because it's slow and only has one point of view, comments and stories like this are more branching in the data because of all the contributors giving devils advocate data about things.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @07:08PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @07:08PM (#175127)

      Well, not this one, this one sucks and I could care less about the convo because it's just navel gazing, but I mean other stories I've seen around, I'm just upset at the mountainous amounts of crappy useless stories compared to ones that have practical data nuggets in them.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by archshade on Saturday April 25 2015, @09:45PM

        by archshade (3664) on Saturday April 25 2015, @09:45PM (#175175)

        I could care less about the convo

        It's I couldn't care less. To say you could care less is almost meaningless. What you'r saying is that you care any (positive) amount, when you mean you care 0. You are literally saying anything but what you mean. Look watch this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw [youtube.com]. I don't blame you many Americans (and people who have learnt English for US TV) make this mistake. Take this as an opportunity to learn and grow. Spread the message, Teach others, make them think about what they are saying and what they mean to say.

        I agree this study is a waste of time and probably just a function of publish or perish or giving an M.Sc somthing to do, might be intersting as a XKCD what if (https://what-if.xkcd.com/59/ [xkcd.com] but not a full peer reviewed paper. In fact I'm not sure why I am even here.

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @07:30PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @07:30PM (#175135)

    Since I gave that silly rant, I should obviously follow my own advice.

    For those of you with an interest in energy production there is a not so new but very interesting and affordable long lasting technology called fresnel lenses.

    These lenses are capable of generating upto 1,200 deg C of heat. This amount of heat is capable of sustaining a liquid metal battery such as those proposed by Donald Sadoway [http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to_renewable_energy?language=en]

    The lenses work by using concentric rings to focus heat energy from the sun. However unlike almost all other technology in the energy sector producing a fresnel lense is simple cheap and easy because it's just a lense, no moving parts, no electronics. This simplicity leads itself to a practical price point (32" lense is about 250$ with max heat of 1,200deg c).

    I purchased and have been testing with this lense for about a week off and on over the course of the last year or so. The lenses are heavy but powerful and you need welding goggles to wield them.

    These types of technologies need not even directly store energy in a battery, hydroelectric dams when they have too much power suck water back up behind the resevoire wall creating a phsyical battery from it's contained force. Fresnel lenses could be utilized with a setup similar to a window farm [http://www.windowfarms.com/] (I built a system like this, it pushes beads of water up a tube that then drops down to a resevoir) where the lenses heat is utilized to fill a large container with water that can be released later over a water wheel.

    • (Score: 2) by CoolHand on Sunday April 26 2015, @02:16AM

      by CoolHand (438) on Sunday April 26 2015, @02:16AM (#175226) Journal

      If you want stories like that published on the site, you should write things like that up as submissions, instead of posting them as off-topic comments...

      --
      Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Adamsjas on Saturday April 25 2015, @07:44PM

    by Adamsjas (4507) on Saturday April 25 2015, @07:44PM (#175139)

    Wikipedia, which provided an average of 15 pages required to print each article.

    Is that printing on both sides? How many pages on a side? What size font? Is the internet only composed of text? Are they postulating printing exactly one copy?

    Even as a thought experiment, this fails on so many levels.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 26 2015, @12:00AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 26 2015, @12:00AM (#175200)

      also... parents and teachers need to stop telling kids that google is "the internet"

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Aichon on Saturday April 25 2015, @08:01PM

    by Aichon (5059) on Saturday April 25 2015, @08:01PM (#175145)

    So, they took a random sampling of 10 and then extrapolated it to apply to something like 13 million articles? Why not just analyze ALL of Wikipedia? Wikipedia provides dumps of snapshots for all of the text on the entire site, after all.

    Let's do a quick and rough analysis, just to get an order of magnitude for this stuff. A quick search indicates that the average word length in use in English is about 5 letters, and that an average printed page of text has around 900 words on it. Toss in a space per word, and we can say that there are about 5400 characters per page. Most of the web is using UTF-8 at this point, and for the characters that overlap with ASCII, only one byte is necessary per character. So, we'll say that about 5400 bytes are necessary per page.

    In 2008 or 2009, I downloaded one of the aforementioned text-based Wikipedia dumps for something I was working on in grad school. As I recall, it was about 3.5 GB (no doubt it'd be larger now).

    3.5 GB = 3584 MB = 3,670,016 KB = 3,758,096,384 bytes
    3,758,096,384 / 5400 = 695,943 pages necessary

    Granted, my analysis assumes that we're printing multiple short articles per page (which seems reasonable to me if we're asking how many pages are necessary to print), and I'm also working off of my recollection of the size of the file from 6-7 years ago. Even so, that's two orders of magnitude different from their numbers, so it does beg the question of why there's such a discrepancy.

    Also, if we're printing the Internet, does that include YouTube? If so, are we doing one video frame per page? At an average of 30fps, that'd be 1800 pages/minute, which would mean that their numbers indicated the entire Internet only has 2.5M minutes of video content.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @10:45PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @10:45PM (#175186)

      Agreed. Also, a Wikipedia dump is only a general snapshot of everything on Wikipedia. Many things that are on Wikipedia will likely not make it in that dump.

      As others have pointed out font size also matters. Also if you're printing out pictures one should consider how big the print outs are vs how many MB they take up. A high resolution picture may require a better printer to really display all the details if printed on in a relatively small area (and if you want to print really high resolution in a small area you may need a magnifying glass to see the details) but a high resolution color picture will likely take up much more memory than monochrome text.

      As others have pointed out one should also consider how many copies are being printed. A Wikipedia article maybe read by millions of people across the world. It's obviously not practical to pass along the same book all across the world to millions of people so you would need to print a million books to accommodate those pageviews (one book can be read by more than one person so if you own a book you can let your friends read or borrow it as well, people can check them out in the library and return them allowing someone else to later check them out).

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 26 2015, @12:11AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 26 2015, @12:11AM (#175203)

        One should also ask if those Wikipedia dumps are compressed and consider the compression ratio.

  • (Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday April 25 2015, @08:54PM

    by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Saturday April 25 2015, @08:54PM (#175164) Homepage Journal

    Methinks there was some politics behind this. In the first place, deforestation of the rain forest is to clear ground for agriculture more than anything. There's logging, but most of this is lumber. I don't know how much of the rainforest is hardwood, but you DON'T make paper from hardwoods!

    Next, why rain forests? There are huge amounts of lumber in North America.

    And we think of books as being a "dead tree medium" but you don't need trees to make paper; any fibrous plant material will do. Hemp makes excellent paper.

    Silly exercise, I hope they had fun doing it.

    --
    mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org