this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
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Bah, that graph needs antimatter.
Is there enough paper on earth?
Antimatter doesn't really do anything by it's own, but if we let 1 kg react with 1 kg of matter (non-anti-matter), we get E = mc^2^ with m = 2 kg. So 1.8 * 10^17^ J, or 1.8 * 10^11^ MJ. If we assume that 10 MJ/kg is represented by about 1 cm, the bar would have to be 1.8 * 10^10^ cm or about 1.8 * 10^8^ m. A standard A4 piece of paper is about 30 cm tall, so 6.0 * 10^8^ A4 papers are needed. I.e. 600 million papers.
So we definitely have enough paper, but it would be a very tall stack.
That's only about 180,000km (~112,000 miles) or just under half way to the moon.
Also some quick googling says an average desktop printer can print about 30,000 pages per month, so it would take 20,000 months (~1670 years) to print that out. And a typical toner cartridge can print 3,000 pages and costs $80, so it would take 200,000 toner cartridges and cost $16 million.
Now, those aren't based on any specific model, just the first result in Google haha