Printing the internet, have you ever wondered how many pieces of paper it would take to print the whole internet? Well here is your answer. Evangeline Walker and George Harwood that attend the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom have now estimated how much of the Amazon Rain Forest, you would need to print the internet, and what is the answer? 1%.
The two students measured out how much information the internet holds by working out the amount of paper that you would need. After working this out they used the amount of trees in the Amazon that would need to be cut down and harvested to produce the paper.
Evangeline and George used the English version of Wikipedia that contains huge amounts of information, they went through and randomly selected 10 articles and found they would need to print fifteen pages for each article.
Using the fifteen pages for each article they then multiplied it by how many pages are on Wikipedia. The number of pages that are on Wikipedia is projected at 4,723,991 and returned with the result of 70,859,865 pieces of paper.
And their last step was to apply this calculation to the number of pages on the internet and came back with 4.54 billion pages would need to be used to print of the entire internet.
They then had to find out how many trees are in the rain forest, they came up with an assumption that all of the trees in the rainforest are eligible to produce paper, and that there are roughly 70,909 trees per square Kilometre.
Harwood and Walker estimated they could convert 17 reams of paper from each tree and 500 sheets in each ream of paper, a returned with a figure of 8,500 sheets of paper per each tree in the Amazon Rainforest. By dividing all the Wikipedia pages up (70,859,865) using 500 pieces of paper Evangeline and George ended up with the result that they would need 141,720 reams to print the web pages of Wikipedia. With the 17 reams produced from a single tree, 8,337 trees would need to be used to print of Wikipedia.
You would need three times the number of tress in New York City, with 500 sheets of paper per ream Walker and Harwood found out that you would need 16 million trees to produce 136 billion sheets of the standard sized paper 8 by 11.
In their conclusion to their assessment they projected that 0.2% of information that is available online is considered non-explicit, and the other 99.8% exists further than the regular search engines used by the public, like Google, Bing and Yahoo, this would mean you would need much larger trees to print the internet in its entirety
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