4 ms·

You'll have to settle for a measly trillion of them

metaphor 11y ago
Certain DARPA-funded emerging technologies[1] will more than likely need just a wee bit more than "a measly trillion". Before spending some time in a wireless sensor net research lab as an undergrad, I had a difficult time imagining the scale of an application that could justify such a massive network address space...probably because I was too focused on trying to visualize what it might look like without considering the possibility that it would be invisible to the human eye. [1] http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~pister/SmartDust/SmartDustBAA97-43-Abstract.pdf http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~pister/SmartDust/SmartDustBAA9...
- msbarnett 11y ago
  consider that there are something like 3.35 * 10^22 water molecules on earth there are 3.4 * 10^38 addresses in the IPv6 space we could individual address every water molecule on earth and still have an enormous amount of space left over so even if DARPA is planning on replacing the oceans with dust (and somehow managing to not exhaust a number of critical resources in this drive to make a truly staggering volume of dust), it's still not an issue
  - metaphor 11y ago
    My thought process isn't as terrestrially constrained...qualitatively science fiction by today's measure, to be frank. I was thinking more along the lines of an architecture adopted today which survives many millennia into the future that accounts for exponential human population growth on a galactic scale, isn't limited by the natural resources of this planet, where increment() will be the only pragmatic address assignment operation, meaningful archaeologic insight might be attained by discovering a microscopic 128-bit invariant, and so on.
    - msbarnett 11y ago
      I mean, yes, IPv6 fails the improbable science-fiction wish-list test, for any number of reasons beyond address space path MTU discovery algorithms aren't going to be efficient when packet transit times are measured in decades, for one thing

Certain DARPA-funded emerging technologies[1] will more than likely need just a wee bit more than "a measly trillion". Before spending some time in a wireless sensor net research lab as an undergrad, I had a difficult time imagining the scale of an application that could justify such a massive network address space...probably because I was too focused on trying to visualize what it might look like without considering the possibility that it would be invisible to the human eye. [1] http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~pister/SmartDust/SmartDustBAA97-43-Abstract.pdf http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~pister/SmartDust/SmartDustBAA9...

msbarnett 11y ago
consider that there are something like 3.35 * 10^22 water molecules on earth there are 3.4 * 10^38 addresses in the IPv6 space we could individual address every water molecule on earth and still have an enormous amount of space left over so even if DARPA is planning on replacing the oceans with dust (and somehow managing to not exhaust a number of critical resources in this drive to make a truly staggering volume of dust), it's still not an issue
- metaphor 11y ago
  My thought process isn't as terrestrially constrained...qualitatively science fiction by today's measure, to be frank. I was thinking more along the lines of an architecture adopted today which survives many millennia into the future that accounts for exponential human population growth on a galactic scale, isn't limited by the natural resources of this planet, where increment() will be the only pragmatic address assignment operation, meaningful archaeologic insight might be attained by discovering a microscopic 128-bit invariant, and so on.
  - msbarnett 11y ago
    I mean, yes, IPv6 fails the improbable science-fiction wish-list test, for any number of reasons beyond address space path MTU discovery algorithms aren't going to be efficient when packet transit times are measured in decades, for one thing