"If the earth were made entirely out of 1 cubic millimetre grains of
sand, then you could give a unique [IPv6] address to each grain in 300
million planets the size of the earth"
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_address)
"The optimistic estimate would allow for 3,911,873,538,269,506,102
addresses per square meter of the surface of the planet Earth." "IP
Next Generation Overview"
(R. Hinden, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 39, No. 6 (June 1996) pp
61 - 71, ISSN:0001-0782
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&id=228517)
``The number of grains of sand in a beach 60 km long, 30m wide and 30cm
deep is some 2 power 48. This quantity, of the order of 10 power 15, also appears to
be roughly the same number as the number of ants in all the world.'':
Wanna get a better idea how much that is ?:
http://pages.prodigy.net/jhonig/bignum/indx.html
* Information taken from Geoff Huston article in July 05 ISP Column, ISOC:
http://ispcolumn.isoc.org/2005-07/ipv6size.html
[Doc: 200507-HowBigIsIPv6-ISPColumn-GeoffHuston.pdf]