Disregarding the amount of infuriating paper jams you’d encounter after pressing ‘Ctrl + P’ on the entire world wide web, just exactly how many sheets of paper would you need to finish the job?
A group of students at the University of Leicester recently worked out an answer to that question, while figuring out what percentage of the Amazon rainforest, the world’s largest expanse of woodland, to do it.
The students started by first figuring out an estimate for how many pages exist on the family-friendly Internet, taking account of searchable websites and ignoring explicit or ‘Dark Web’ pages. Using Wikipedia as a benchmark, the group found that the average article on the crowd-source encyclopaedia uses an average of 15 A4 pages when committed to paper.
Taking that figure and applying it to the estimated 4.54bn pages on the Internet, and given that the average tree can produce 8,500 sheets of paper, crunching the numbers revealed it would take 8,011,765 trees to print out the entire Internet – coming in at 68,100,002,500 pages. But given that the average Wikipedia article’s 15-page estimate is very conservative, the Leicester students doubled the final tally, arriving at 136bn sheets of A4.
And while this seems like a hug volume of paper, it actually only amounts to 0.002 percent of the Amazon.
