The googleplex
I'm sitting here bored at work, and I started to think of the largest number I know of: the "googleplex". What is this number? Well a "google" is 10 to the power of 100, that is a one with one hundred zeros that follow it. A 'googleplex" is 10 to the power of a google; a one with a google zeros behind it. That is alot of zeros! For a small comparison, here is a google written out:
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
To write out a googleplex I would have to write out that many zeros. I've been told that to do this is a physical impossibillity so I decided to figure out how impossible it really was. After some quick excel work I found this out:
to write out a googleplex at a rate of 100 zeros per second would take 3,170,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years (3.17x10^90).
Our universe is less than 15 billion years old! It is estimated that protons will decay in 10^40 years. There is no way I would have the time to write out a googleplex.
But lets just say I did have the time to write it out, how long would it be? If I could write it out with 10 zeros every centimeter a googleplex would be 1,060,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 LIGHT YEARS long (1.06x10^81).
The Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across. The "diameter" of the Universe has been estimated at 156 billion light years by astrophysicist Neil Cornish (Montanna State University). So if a written out googleplex suddenly appeared it would have to wind around itself to attempt to fit.
Writing out a googleplex would just be a waste of time.
|