How Many Pages It Takes to Print the Entire Internet
Scientists do the math on what it would take to print every page.
— -- It's the ultimate estimation game: How many pieces of paper would it take to print the entire Internet?
Two British scientists have arrived at the approximate number of pages they say it would take to create a hard copy of everything on the Internet.
The answer: 136 billion standard 8 1/2 by 11-inch pieces of printer paper.
Using Wikipedia as a baseline, the scientists at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom estimated 4,723,991 English pages exist on the site.
From there they determined the average number of pages each would require to print is 15, putting a hard copy of the English version of the encyclopedic website at 70,859,865 paper pages.
With approximately 4.54 billion pages on the Internet, the team doubled their Wikipedia rule to approximate that it would take approximately 30 pieces of paper per Web page to be printed.
The result is 136.2 billion pieces of paper. Want some more math?
At 500 sheets of paper per ream and each tree yielding 17 reams, it would take 16 million trees to print a hard copy of the Internet.
The results were published in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Science Topics.