As you go about your daily life, texting your friends, checking e-mail online, and Googling a question on your phone as you eat lunch, you may not stop to think about how much you depend on technology these days. Those marvelously advanced devices are great, but some of the technology underlying the devices occasionally treads on shaky ground because it was not originally designed with hundreds of millions of users in mind.

You may not realize that the Internet itself is running out of address numbers — those street signs that tell your computer where to go to find the data on your favorite website. If you didn’t know, when you type an address like www.google.com into your Web browser, that Web address is translated into a 32-bit address of the server where the Google website is located (Google.com = 74.125.95.105 from Parks Library as of this writing). The only problem is that with this 32-bit size, the Internet can only have 2³² or 4.295 billion unique web IP addresses.

While you may believe that 4 billion is a large number, with the number of web-enabled smart phones, televisions and cars being produced today — each with a unique IP address — the addresses should be completely exhausted next year. You can follow IPv4Countdown on Twitter or an iPhone/Android app that counts down to the “IP Doomsday” if you want to know precisely when we will run out.

So what happens then? Do we not allow more users to access the Internet? That would be disappointing and may cause global economic problems. Instead, the researchers and companies that maintain the Internet developed a new address system called IPv6 — the current system is called IPv4 — with larger 128-bit addresses, allowing for 340 undecillion (3.4³⁸ x 10) unique Web addresses.

For reference, that number is approximately 1.5 times the number of stars thought to exist in the universe, and should be enough addresses for the Internet until long after we are all long gone.

There is just one problem — the two systems are not designed to be compatible. So while most computers can use IPv6 or can be easily upgraded to use it, most computers in the Western world don’t use it yet — the “Western world” because as inventors of the Internet, the U.S. was allocated a much larger proportion of the total stock of IP addresses than countries on the other side of the globe.

So expect a subtle and possibly imperceptible shift inside your Internet devices in the next two years as new devices begin to use the new IPv6 system. If all goes to plan, the change should be gradual and easy, but there will surely be hiccups. The situation has been likened in a way to the Y2K bug a few years ago, but it is different because it is less time-constrained while present on a larger scale.

Why did I explain this issue that is normally too technical for most people to understand or care about? I wanted to remind you about the levels of complexity underneath the simple buttons on your iPhone or on your computer desktop. Remember that your parents or their friends may have used a word processor to write a paper or a room-sized punch card IBM mainframe to program in Fortran or Cobol when they were your age. We have come a long way in only a few short decades.

So take the time to stop once in a while to take a second and recognize how different your life would be without your laptop, the Internet or your cell phone. Imagine what you and your generation might invent to make the world a better place. How will you change the world?