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Comment by X-Istence | Hacker News Reader

I doubt you can scan the entirety of IPv6 address space in under 6 minutes ...

I'd really like to know what the answer would be, so I thought I'd do the math. So, anybody please correct me, but my math comes up to something like 3.4x10^21 times the age of the universe given the rate above.

2^128 ip-addresses / 10 million packets a second = 7.8 * 10^13 times the age of the universe [1]

To actually scan the entirety of ipv6 address space in under 6 minutes you would need to send 1 billion billion billion billion packets a second [2], or 100 octillion times faster than 10 million packets a second. [3]

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2%5E128%2F10%5E7+second...

[2] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2%5E128%2F360

[3] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10%5E36%2F10%5E7

Assuming ideal conditions, a 10GbE adapter uses about 20W to send at most about 15 million packets per second. Assuming no improvements in efficiency (unlikely), the network adapter that could do this would use 3500 times the power of the sun for that six minutes[1], which would be an amount of energy comparable to the kinetic energy of the Earth orbiting the sun (1/6th) [2]. That amount of energy would be enough to more than boil the oceans[3], it would practically liquefy the Earth. It would be enough energy to ionize a ball of water the size of the earth into plasma, according to some sources, but I'm skeptical that 10000 Kelvin water at that volume would remain a plasma for long.

tl;dr: We won't be scanning the IPv6 address space any time soon. And hopefully not on Earth.

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2%5E128%2F360+*+%2820+w...

[2] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2%5E128%2F360+*+%2820+w...

[3] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%282%5E128%2F360+*+%282...

[4] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%282%5E128%2F360+*+%282...

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