The Absurdly Larger Numbers And My Healthy Obsession With Them

Ever since I was a child, large numbers were my thing.

Every single day I would wake up to my dad reading to me a new segment he had come across when having his coffee first thing in the morning.

Every day, I’d learn something new. And if it was not something new, it would be a new figure — you know, a new statistic/number that would blow my dad and my tiny little brains out — like the world’s smallest insect in size, or learning about the tiniest measurement that is a Planck (and then I would wonder, what if you were to divide a Planck into half? Debate goes on until this day. Please let me know in the comment section provided there is a definite answer of the possibility of half or a third or a fourth of a planck), the tallest human in all of history, the tallest building, mountain, biggest penis etc.

The knowledge of figures would bundle up and up. I kind of think it had exceeded ten thousand times I’d learn about a new fact regarding the tallest, highest, shortest or longest things… How many people that have been alive and death. How many things are there. How many atoms the universe.

Alternatively, I’d be curious about anything from the start of time to the end of time. That Betty White was older than sliced bread (the math checks out). Or the fact that we are closer to the death of Cleopatra than Cleopatra was to the pyramids.

Let’s say 10.000 times, approximately, I’d have my mind blown away (aha moment) That’s about four zeroes. Significant yet cute, close to almost nothing compared to what I was about to learn later on in life.

Who else (doesn’t) remember those snippets of facts in magazines you found in your family’s closet which they had specifically told you not to touch because there were so many hot babes which could potentially ruin my youngster’s brain, sans for the scientific, informative sections which 1. Either bore you to death or 2. Would interest you so much you’d give up everything else including your favorite tv show and snack to acquire/absorb such knowledge in the shortest amount of time possible.

I was on the latter boat (which did explain my being teased throughout elementary and middle school). Either way, my mind was ruined forever.

Of course, at one point it did manifest as my love and on more than one occasions daydreaming of having an enormous amount of money. Like a trillion dollars. Who wouldn’t want to have a trillion dollars (sans those unfortunately living in Zimbabwe)? Or a trillion billion dollars? And thinking about the wealth spread throughout the world alone is enough for me to get both depressed and relieved that all that money and still we can’t get along — at the same time, all that money and still those wealthy fuckers can’t find happiness — a cope to pat myself on the back whenever the amount of zeroes in my bank account is less than 3.

Moving on.

There are about 100 billion stars in our Milky Way. Freaky isn’t it? What is more absurd is that there have been 436,117,076,600,000,000 seconds since the beginning of the universe.

Just think about that for a second (which would make it 436,117,076,600,000,001). That is in-and-around 13.82 billion years.

What is more freaky is that the number of stars in the universe, in fact, is larger than the number of Rubik’s Cube permutations, grains of sand and the amount of tablespoons of water in the earth’s oceans.

There are approximately 100 billion galaxies in the universe, each with about 100 billion to 1 trillion stars. The Milky Way, for example, has about 300 billion stars, and Andromeda has about 1 trillion.

This gives us about 1023 stars in the observable universe. That’s a ‘one’ followed by twenty three ‘zeros’. That’s 100 thousand billion billion, or 100 sextillion.

Or, almost exactly equal to the number of cells in every living human combined.

That alone kind of explained the Fermi Paradox — a conflict between the argument that scale and probability seem to favor intelligent life being common in the universe, and the total lack of evidence of intelligent life having ever arisen anywhere other than on Earth.

Because there is no way that we are alone in this universe.

Absolutely no way.

And that is just the tippiest of the tips of the numbers of numbers out there. That is as entry as coffee to any drug under the sun, Christopher Nolan to Yevgeni Bauer, or Taylor Swift to whatever gem you stumble across on Youtube at 3AM that has approximately 20 views.

And obscure numbers (correlatedly, the larger the numbers the less frequent that they are talked about at parties) are fun to think about at night.

Googling (heh) the largest numbers ever certainly does not help with my arguably unhealthy obsession. Anything from a Googol to a googolplex get me down a rabbit hole of woah how long would it take to count all that.

Middle school came eventually, then I learned about girls. And Graham’s Number. And most people would freak out if they knew what a Graham’s number is. And for some weird reasons, the thought of Graham’s number interested me way more.

It is so large that the observable universe is far too small to contain an ordinary digital representation of Graham’s number, assuming that each digit occupies one Planck volume … But even the number of digits in this digital representation of Graham’s number would itself be a number so large that its digital representation cannot be represented in the observable universe. Nor even can the number of digits of that number — and so forth, for a number of times far exceeding the total number of Planck volumes in the observable universe.

A graham’s number is nothing short of a true nightmare. Not infinity. You can’t count to infinity anyway which makes it less impressive and more humorous to say, “to infinity and beyond” than “to the Graham’s number and beyond”. Virtually anyone would beat you to death if they knew what a Graham’s number is and you wish them to live to a Graham’s number for an amount of years. I bet you a millionth of a Graham’s number of money that the human brains aren’t even capable of perceiving, let alone living through that amount of tick-tacks, LET ALONE living through that amount of years. If I did win, however, I’d still be richer than any other person, or entity ever lived combined.

Money would have been meaningless.

In actuality, Graham’s number does not only exist, but it’s the largest number ever that was actually used in a serious scientific paper.

“He came up with the number in 1977, and it gained recognition when a colleague wrote about it in Scientific American and called it “a bound so vast that it holds the record for the largest number ever used in a serious mathematical proof.” The number ended up in the Guinness Book of World Records in 1980 for the same reason, and though it has today been surpassed, it’s still renowned for being the biggest number most people ever hear about. That’s why Graham’s number is a thing — it’s not just an arbitrarily huge number, it’s actually relevant in the world of math.”

I’ll leave you this tiny little link for y’all to figure out what a Graham’s number is, once again, by the wonderful human being called Tim Urban.

For now, I’ll contemplate about all the other zeroes in my life.

Minh Tu Le