Large Numbers

What are large numbers? They help us understand the Universe. We can use these numbers in our everyday life. What is 1,000,000,000? If you want to learn more about them, this is for you.

What is a large number?

A large number is a number that is greater than 100. Try and count to 100, yes it only takes about a minute and 40 seconds if you count slow. So we can say that as you count slower, the longer it takes to count.

Large number list

• Million (=${10}^{6}$)
  • This number is so tiny that it's familiar in our world.
  • In 2007, Jeremy Harper finished counting aloud to a million, and earned his place in the Guiness World Records.
  • A megasecond (1 million seconds) is 11.5 days.
  • A tower of a million people would stretch 1700 km high, 4 times higher than ISS.
• Billion (=${10}^{9}$)
  • The world population is 8 billion.
  • Counting to a billion is only allowed for immortals, because it takes 125 years.
  • A gigasecond (billion seconds) is 31.7 years, which most people probably want to celebrate.
• Trillion (=${10}^{12}$)
  • Our planet has ~3.5 trillion fish.
  • Human body contains ~50 trillion cells.
  • A terasecond (trillion seconds) is 31,688 years, so a terasecond ago was the time of the last neanderthals.
• Quadrillion (=${10}^{15}$)
  • Our planet has ~1 quadrillion ants.
  • In ~200 quadrillion seconds from now, the Sun will be a red giant.
• Quintillion (=${10}^{18}$)
  • The diameter of the Milky Way Galaxy is ~1 quintillion kilometers.
  • World Ocean contains 326 quintillion gallons of water.
  • 3x3x3 Rubik's cube has ~43 quintillion combinations.
• Septillion (=${10}^{24}$)
• Decillion (=${10}^{33}$)
• Googol (=${10}^{100}$)
  • NOT to be confused with Google!! Google is actually a misspelling.
  • The googol was coined in 1920 by Milton Sirotta, 9 year old nephew of Edward Kasner. 20 years later, the latter published the book Mathematics and the Imagination.
  • It is also the namesake of Google (reason is to describe the size of the internet).
  • It is larger than the atoms in the universe (${10}^{80}$), but still smaller than the atoms in a multiverse.
  • The time it takes for the supermassive black hole with 20 trillion solar masses is ~1 googol years.
  • Only immortals are allowed to imagine the size of a googol.
• Centillion (=${10}^{303}$)
• Millillion (=${10}^{3003}$)
• Micrillion (=${10}^{3,000,003}$)
• Googolplex (=${10}^{{10}^{100}}$)
  • Also proposed by Milton Sirotta in 1938, and suggested it should be 1 followed by writing zeroes before getting tired. Edward Kasner, not satisfied by this vague definition, refined it to its current quantity.
  • There is a book series called Googolplex Written Out, by Wolfgang Nitscher, with ${10}^{94}$ volumes.
• Googolduplex (=${10}^{{10}^{{10}^{100}}}$)
• Googoltriplex (=${10}^{{10}^{{10}^{{10}^{100}}}}$)
• Googolquadriplex (=${10}^{{10}^{{10}^{{10}^{{10}^{100}}}}}$)
• Super K (=10↑↑↑↑3)
• Graham's Number (=$G(64)$)
  • This number is UNIMAGINABLY larger than a googolplex.
• TREE(3) (=???)

We can use these numbers to figure out the Universe. Creators will often use these numbers if they are talking about the vast Universe. The largest non-salad number was discovered by Emlightened and is the Sasquatch. However, there are also some transfinite numbers:

• Aleph-null (=$N0$)
• Omega (=$w$)

The study of discovering large numbers is called googology, and you may learn more about it here.