Want to print the Internet? You need 136 billion sheets of paper
Someone needs to figure out how many ink cartridges we're going to need!
By : DC Correspondent
Update: 2015-04-28 12:10 GMT
London: UK scientists have calculated that the entire internet can be printed on 136 billion sheets of standard 8-by-11 paper. George Harwood and Evangeline Walker, students at the University of Leicester in the UK, made use of the English version of Wikipedia as an example that contained vast information. They randomly selected 10 articles and estimated that they would have to print 15 pages for each one.
Using this figure, the researchers then multiplied it by the number of pages in Wikipedia, projected at 4,723,991, yielding a result of about 70,859,865 paper pages, 'Tech Times' reported. They then extrapolated that value to the number of total webpages on the internet, roughly 4.5 billion, and tweaked their final guess to account for the variable size of different websites.
To find out how many trees in the Amazon would have to be harvested, Harwood and Walker established that there are approximately 70,909 equally distributed trees per sqkm in the forest. They estimated that each usable tree could provide 17 reams of paper and 500 individual paper sheets in each ream, for a total of 8,500 sheets of paper per Amazon tree.
By dividing the 70,859,865 Wikipedia paper pages using the 500 sheets of paper in each ream, the researchers ended up with 141,720 reams needed to print the Wikipedia pages. With 17 reams of paper produced from each tree, 8,337 trees would have to be collected to print Wikipedia. It would take about 16 million trees to produce the 136 billion sheets needed to print the web.