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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: 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.