And I was getting so close to the end...

Just as I thought I was getting to the end of the Internet (yes, I was getting very close - I only had a few more webpages to read...), the smarty cats at RIPE develop IPv6 and add another

340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 new web addresses .

That's 340 undecillion, 282 decillion, 366 nonillion, 920 octillion, 938 septillion, for you numerophobes out there. Seems like 4 billion just wasn't quite enough, seeing as there's 6 billion global neighbors, and what's going to happen when all those third world countries get online?

To put it in something we might be able to imagine, here's a perspective on what a billion might be. I once saw $1million in $20 bills. It was a stack roughly 3 feet high, and about 4' x 4'. A billion $ would be 1000 of those. And those were $20 bills... I can't imagine $1 bills....

1 million seconds was 11.5 days ago
1 billion seconds ago was the year 1975

1 million minutes was 1.9 years ago
1 billion minutes ago was the year 104 AD

1 million days ago was 733 BC
1 billion days was 2,739,726 years ago

A billion is hard to imagine...Even less, I can't imagine a undecillion, or how much space that will create on the World Wide Web.

Surely there's a spiritual lesson in that - maybe relate it to the infiniteness of God... I remember doing a study once on the vastness of the known universe - and that blew my mind. Our Sun is 92,955,820 miles away. And our sun is close...comparatively. Just in the known universe, travelling at the speed of light, 186,282.397 miles per second, it would take between 46 and 78 billion years to reach the edges of what we know to be the universe. OK, I'll stop... As I was excitedly relaying this to my wife last night at around 11:00 p.m., her comment to me was, "You're a nerd!"

So if that makes you feel small and insignificant, think about this - In all of the heavens, God created this little speck of cosmic dust we live on, then created man in His own image to populate the Earth. Considering the scope of the heavens, and all that was created, after man sinned, God could have just flicked that little dust particle out of space and started all over. Yet, He sent His only begotten Son to forgive His creation, man, so that we could live forever with Him in eternity.

That really blows my mind.