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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
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday April 25 2015, @08:54PM
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
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday April 26 2015, @12:05AM
It will make a great paragraph in the World Almanac for Kids.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Informative) by gnuman on Sunday April 26 2015, @05:52AM
I don't know how much of the rainforest is hardwood
Almost all of it is hardwood. And most is illegally logged, and opposition is literally shot. That's modern Brazil for you. And now that there is only patches of trees left in some areas, they are complaining that there is no more rain and too many droughts... Imagine that - trees making rain... hmm.. someone won a Nobel Prize for showing that trees affect the very climate they are part of .. oh right, the Tree Lady of Africa.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wangari_Maathai [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Belt_Movement [wikipedia.org]