Numbers So Large They Stop Making Sense

Human brains evolved to understand numbers like 10, 50, or maybe a few thousand. When we talk about the internet, we are forced to deal with billions, trillions, and quintillions. Every single day, over 300 billion emails are sent. If each email were a physical letter, they would cover the entire surface of the Earth in paper every few months.

At the microscopic level, the numbers are just as baffling. A modern smartphone processor contains around 16 billion transistors. These microscopic switches are so small (often 3 nanometres across) that you could fit thousands of them across the width of a single human hair. We have essentially learned to build complex cities at the atomic scale.

The Internet Is Newer Than You Think

Despite its massive scale, the digital world is incredibly young. The very first email was sent in 1971 between two computers sitting right next to each other. The World Wide Web didn't exist until 1991, when Tim Berners-Lee published the first website. Google wasn't founded until 1998.

It took until roughly 2014 for the internet to reach 1 billion websites. Today, over 5.4 billion people — about two-thirds of the global population — are connected to this network, generating exabytes of data every hour.

From Screen Back to the Real World

The newest corner of this hub runs the other direction: instead of counting the digital world, the 3D Workshop turns digital files back into physical objects. The STL format that carries every 3D print was defined in 1987 and has barely changed since — yet the desktop tools built around it keep dying or going paid. Pepakura Designer costs money and only runs on Windows; Autodesk killed Slicer for Fusion 360 in 2020. The four workshop tools — the papercraft unfolder, the cardboard slicer, the image-to-STL loft and the point sculptor — run entirely in your browser, free, with nothing uploaded anywhere.

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