Part of the joy of being a scientist is getting to take a crack at questions that no one has an answer to - questions like "How much paper would you need to print out the entire internet?"
It may sound more like a "thought experiment" you'd hear in a dorm room on 4/20, but University of Leicester students George Harwood and Evangeline Walker published their findings on it in a peer-reviewed student journal run by their uni.
The answer? Apparently 136 billion sheets of standard printer paper. In other words, a lot of trips to Staples.
The duo reached this number by first figuring out that it would take over 70 million sheets to print out all of Wikipedia, then extrapolating from there.
Making that much paper would use 16 million trees - which, to be fair, is only a small fraction of the four hundred billion trees estimated to make up the Amazon rainforest alone.
So could you print out the entire internet onto sheets of paper? Apparently, yes. But should you? That's another question entirely.
Quick, someone figure out how many ink cartridges we're going to need!
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