Useful Large Numbers
Uncommon Large Numbers
You may hear numbers up to the trillions. After that, the numbers are not used in everyday life. Human beings cannot even comprehend how large these numbers are.
Skipping the tens and hundreds, you have the following:
1015. quadrillion
1018. quintillion
1021. sextillion
1024. septillion
1027. octillion
1030. nonillion
1033. decillion
1036. undecillion
1039. duodecillion
1042. tredecillion
1045. quattuordecillion
1048. quindecillion
1051. sexdecillion
1054. septendecillion
1057. octodecillion
1060. novemdecillion
1063. vingintillion
Of course, you could keep counting forever, but such high numbers are not very useful in everyday life.
There is one large number you should know because it has a special name most people can recognize: 10100 or a googol.
You spell “Google,” the name of the search engine, a little differently, but the pronunciation is exactly the same. In fact, the very large googol is where the name of the search engine, Google, came from.
Fun with Large Numbers
How many?
Numbers can get very large! Human beings are not very good at keeping track of very large numbers.
As numbers get very large, we cannot imagine how large they really are.
How many dots do you think are in the picture?
There are “only” 1,000 (one thousand) dots in the picture.
Imagine what a million (a thousand thousand) looks like… you would need 1,000 of these pictures.
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A Googol
One googol is 10100 (10 to the power of 100).
One googol has one hundred zeros!
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.
If you have a googol of pens, can you imagine how many pens that really is?
Everything is far in space
The sun is approximately 149 million kilometers from Earth.That’s 149,000,000 km.
How far is Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to Earth? It’s about 39,900,000,000,000 kilometers (or 4.3 lightyears).
How wide is our galaxy, the Milky Way? Our galaxy is about 950,000,000,000,000,000 km wide (or nine hundred fifty quadrillion kilometers).
How wide is the observable Universe? It’s 93,000,000,000,000,000,000 km (or nine quintillion kilometers)
How many atoms in a drop of water?
One drop of water has 5.01×1021 atoms. (Remember that atoms are very small!) That’s 5 sextillion 10 quintillion atoms! That’s 50,100,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms
All the atoms in the Universe
How many atoms are there in the Universe? You might think you need thousands of zeros for such a large number. However, scientists estimate there are 1082 atoms in the Universe.
That’s “only” 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 atoms.
That is much less than a googol. A google is such a large number that we cannot comprehend it!