The username noahfranklin is already taken. Here are some suggestions: _noah_franklin2447, n~franklin611, n.f77977.

We’ve all heard the claims. Humans are depleting the world’s natural resources, and we’re going to run out of room on Earth sooner or later. But, there’s something else we might run out of: usernames.

I’m talking about email addresses, twitter accounts and any other thing you can sign up for on the Internet. Think about it. What’s going to happen in several years from now when all coherent, simple and meaningful usernames are gone?

The Internet is barely 20 years old, yet it’s already hard to find a good username. In order to put your name on the Internet, it’s necessary to add to it a string of arbitrary numbers, periods and underscores.

But when someone with my name a few generations down the line gets around to making a Gmail account, he might have to tack on a number in the thousands. If that isn’t appealing, maybe he’ll use his pet’s name instead, or even his favorite food. Of course those usernames will have numbers on the end too.

Consider this: Assuming that a username can be up to 10 digits long, and consists of any of the 26 English letters or 10 numbers, then there are 3,760,620,109,779,060 possible usernames.

I just put that number in because it looks cool and makes me seem good at math, but really I believe it’s irrelevant for a couple reasons.

Firstly, a hefty majority of those possibilities are complete gobbledygook that nobody in their right mind would choose as a username; strings of gibberish with no discernible names or words.

Secondly, sites like Gmail never recycle usernames, even after accounts have been deleted due to inactivity, causing us to burn through available names faster than you might think.

So until we develop technology to telepathically share information, and the Internet is no longer a useful thing, ways to express our identity will continue to be eaten up unless something is done about it.

Perhaps, sites could allow duplicate names, like Facebook does, or choose to reuse old, inactive account names.

But, one thing’s for sure: if we can’t recycle usernames, we will never run out of possible combinations. However, they will definitely continue to become longer and more convoluted, until each person is reduced to a valueless username resembling a social security code.