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I always thought it’s kind of odd how frivolous we are with IPv6 addresses given the problems that gave us with IPv4. US DoD has like 200 million IPv4 addresses and they probably only use a tiny fraction of that. There’s also a bunch of old companies like HP, IBM, and Apple, that have entire /8s, so that’s 16 million IPs each. I know IPv6 is ridiculously bigger but we’re talking about giving IP addresses to our lightbulbs now at a time we’re also looking to inhabit other planets.

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Harlehatschi@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
But it’s 2⁵² addresses for each star in the observable universe. Or in other words, if every star in the observable universe has a planet in the habitable zone, each of them got 2²⁰ more IPs than there are IPv4 addresses.

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melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Going to other planets would require a total re-architecting of our communications infrastructure anyway. There’s such distance too it’s not really viable to have a shared internet. Even Mars would have up to 22 minute latency at peak. So I don’t think it makes sense to plan our current internet around potential future space colonization.

Even so, IPv6 is truly massive. We could give a /64 to every square centimeter of the Earth’s surface and still have IPs to spare. Frankly, I think the protocol itself will be obsolete before we run out.

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- iopq@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  You thought so, but in year 2525 they will still be complaining about TCP congestion mechanisms
  
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