Walt, permission to reprint granted! (It was probably implicit with DLTJ’s Creative Commons By-NC-SA license, but might as well be explicit.)

Your comment to my comment about MARC is still buzzing around in my brain. I can’t quite put a finger on it yet, but that string of words is niggling the ‘jester’ side of my persona.

I hope nobody makes an attempt to answer that question. I pose it because someone somewhere linked to a very odd page (one of those that undermines the idea that “.edu” confers any special gravitas), which had a comment about 55 billion web pages that, if printed out, would reach to the moon and back several trillion times.

Obvious hyperbole, to be sure, but it raised a fundamentally unanswerable and very silly question that took no more than two minutes to answer (noting that the answer is meaningless): Just under 48.

That is, if each web page fits on a single sheet of 8.5×11″ paper (obvious nonsense, but work with me here), and if you could solve the minor engineering problems, and if the moon actually had a perfectly circular orbit at its average distance from Earth, rather than the elliptical orbit it actually has, then… that taped-together space monster would be right around 47.7 times as long as the distance from the earth to the moon. (It’s Webra!)

Now, if there were actually 48.4 billion web pages…(the length of the Wikipedia entry related to this final thought says something about Wikipedia. Maybe.)

Thanks for adding another hard fact to this remarkable discussion. I need to ask you and Peter both for permission to run a mildly-edited version of this whole discussion to a future issue of Cites & Insights; it’s too good to limit to W.a.r.’s smaller audience!

We actually upped the ante by using the two-disc slimline cases, doubling it to 2,977,600–but that doesn’t come close to doubling the weight, since a substantial percentage of the disc-plus-case weight is the case itself. (Netflix would be in trouble if a DVD weighed more than about 25g, since that would substantially increase their postage costs–figuring 3g for the disc sleeve and mailer combined and staying within an ounce or 28g.) My rough guesstimate was somewhere around 90 tons (not metric tons), but that’s a rough guesstimate. Still, I believe, well within a 747′s capacity.

Peter, Thom: Any objection to quoting this whole discussion in Cites & Insights? Collaborative investigation at work…

AACR: I’m not going there under any circumstances.

Oh, I won’t get you /.ed, I don’t think: My readership isn’t that big.

Hmmm — come to think of it, the first flight of the Boeing 747 is just about the same time as LC MARC pilot project!