You know when somebody says that something is "astronomically big"?

...well, it turns out astronomers use some pretty freakin' big numbers!! o_O



Anyway, I have collected the following series of numbers from Wolfram Alpha:

6.5 10^9  Number of people currently alive.
1.1 10^11 Number of people who have ever lived.
3   10^11 Number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
2   10^13 Number of red blood cells in an adult human.

     10^21 Number of grains of sand on Earth (currently).
6.0 10^23 Number of atoms in 12 g of Carbon-12.

5.2 10^49 Number of possible chess positions.

8.1 10^53 Number of elements in The Monster Group.

     10^80 Number of atoms in the observable universe.

I note there's quite a few gaps in there, so I turned to Wikipedia to 
try to fill them. Check these out:

4.33 10^19 Number of valid combinations for a Rubik's Cube.

8 10^10 Number of galaxies in the universe.
5 10^22 Number of stars in the universe.

4 10^11 Number of stars in a "typical" galaxy.

   10^57 Number of H atoms in a "typical" star.
4 10^68 Number of H atoms in a "typical" galaxy.

2 10^30 Kg  Mass of a "typical" star.
4 10^41 Kg  Mass of a "typical" galaxy.
3 10^52 Kg  Mass of the observable universe (exluding Dark Matter).

So, there's a few numbers there.

With suitable queries, you can also get Wolfram Alpha to spit out the 
following numbers:

8.8  10^26 m    Diammeter of the observable universe.
4.32 10^17 s    Age of the universe.
3    10^22 m^3  Volume of the observable universe.

These are harder to get though.

So far, I have yet to find anything outside mathematics that even 
remotely approaches a googol.

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