Who could've thought in 1981 that more than a few thosand universities would ever like to connect to the then 250 machines big ARPANET. With 4 billion addresses, there was plenty of headroom at the time.

In 50 years, when the last ISP finally switches to IPv6, we'll be wondering how short sighted we were as now every pencil has an IP address in the interplanetary compu-global-hyper-meganet.

[–] confusedbytheBasics@lemmy.world 10 points 5 months ago

We planned for that. We should be fine at least until we are an interstellar species. We could assign an IPV6 address to EVERY ATOM ON THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH, and still have enough addresses left to do another 100+ earths. It isn’t remotely likely that we’ll run out of IPV6 addresses at any time in the future.