Once upon a time in YouTube history, Mr Beast made a video where he counted all the way from 1 to 100,000.

The process took him 40 entire hours to finish, which got me thinking, How far could you actually physically count, too?

If you just kept on going like if you never stopped and just kept on going on and on and on for an infinite amount of time, where would you end up at the answers to that question?

Start simple.

But the numbers eventually get so enormous, so colossal that the math begins to get really, really weird, like breaking the universe and reality itself.

Kind of weird.

We'll get to that point soon, but let's start out by diving into some number counts that we can actually comprehend first.

Once upon a time, 10 years before Mr Beast completed his count to 100 1000 another board crazy man had the idea toe livestream himself, counting not toe 100,000 but to one million.

His name is Jeremy Harper, and in preparation for the task he was setting himself, he requested off from work, locked himself in his apartment room, turned on his camera and began counting.

He would do nothing but count number after number for 16 hours every day, reserving the remaining eight hours for eating and sleeping.

He was determined to never leave his apartment until he reached the mythical number of one million and ordered all of the food that he needed through delivery services.

He soldiered on day after day until finally, after 89 straight days of counting, one number after another in front of a camera, he finally made it toe one million and earned the Guinness Book of World Records achievement for the highest number ever manually counted to buy a human.

So if you wanted to be, this record accounted to one million and one prepared to spend at least 89 days trying to do it now, obviously that is possible to do.

But how far could you actually count, too, if you dedicated all of your time towards it?

If county toe one million takes around 89 days.

And if you kept up that same pace going on from there, and if you began counting from one at the age of 10 then by the time you hit the age of 79 which happens to be the average life expectancy in the United States, you would probably end up hitting somewhere around 283 million.

And that is, if you did nothing else but count day after day for 16 hours every single day.

Worst of all, 283 million doesn't even really seem like that huge of a number, especially compared to what's coming next.

But in reality, that's probably about as far as a single human being could ever reach counting to during a lifetime.

But numbers obviously get way, way bigger than 283 million.

In the mad world of math, consider for a moment the difference between one million and one billion.

At first glance, when you're just looking at the numbers, they don't really seem to be that much different.

But one billion is, in fact, a vastly larger number than one million.

If you take both numbers in terms of seconds, you would discover that one million seconds is approximately the same as 12 days.

That maybe seems like a decently long time until you switch over toe one billion seconds and discover that's the same as 30 entire years worth of time.

And comparing one trillion seconds makes even one billion looked like a puny number because one trillion seconds is almost the same as 30,000 years.

One million seconds ago was less than two weeks ago.

One billion seconds ago was back when the Soviet Union still existed and one trillion seconds ago the Neanderthals had only recently gone extinct.

Each increase in the order of magnitude from one million to one billion and one trillion dramatically increases the scale of the number that you're talking about.

And they just keep getting bigger and bigger After you hit the trillions.

You just keep going up through quadrillion quintillion, cept illion and so on and so on, all the way until you eventually reach a Google, which is the same as 10 to the 1/100 power or a one with 100 zeros written after it.

Which, for the record, looks like this a Google is an absolutely enormous number, and it's almost possible for our human brains to truly comprehend it to try and put it into some perspective.

10 to the 80th Power is a vastly smaller number than a Google is, but that is already roughly equal to the number of every single individual Adam that exists in the entire observable universe.

To put it all into even more perspective, consider for a moment the difference in mass between a single simple electron and the entire observable universe.

With around two trillion Galaxies, the mass of the electron is 10 to the negative 30th power kilograms, while the mass of the observable universe is 10 to the 60th power kilograms.

The difference in mass between the two is only 10 to the 90th power, which is only the same as 0.0 zero 0001% of a Google.

This means that at the scale of a Google, the mass of an electron and the mass of the entire universe are effectively identical to blow your mind, even mawr, with just how big of a number of Google is, imagine the size of the entire observable universe.

It's 93 billion light years across, meaning that it takes light 93 billion entire years just to travel from one side over to the other.

It's unbelievably huge, but imagine filling up this entire space from top to bottom and from side to side completely 100% with sand.

Imagine being able to fly at the speed of light and flying through nothing but endless sand in every direction for tens of billions of years in whatever direction you choose to fly in.

It doesn't matter.

It would all seem essentially endless to you.

But now imagine counting out every single individual grain of sand in that entire universe filled to the brim with sand.

How long do you think that that might take you?

Eternity is honestly not a far fetched answer.

But after you've finally done it and you've laid to rest the final grain of sand in the entire universe sized sandbox, you would realize that in orderto actually reach a Google grains of sand, you would have to start all over again from grain of sand number one and begin county again from scratch and repeat that whole entire process over again.

Another 100,000 times.

Only then, after you've counted every single grain of sand in the universe sized sandbox 100,000 times over again, would you finally arrive at a Google grains of sand?

But of course, a Google is a puny number when compared with a googol plex, which is simply a Google to the Google.

If power, it was already basically impossible to imagine how Maney grains of Sand a Google would actually be.

So how can you possibly even begin to comprehend the size of a googol plex instead of trying to imagine the size of the number?

Let's just imagine for a moment how long it would actually take to simply write the number out.

A typical 400 page book can be written with 10 to the sixth zeros inside of it across every page.

So if you just continuously wrote 400 page book after 400 page book with nothing but zeros and all of them, you would need to write 10 to the 94th books in order to reach a googol plex zeros.

So to put that into perspective, if each book weighed only 100 g, they're literally isn't enough mass in the entire universe to create that many books because the mass of all of those books would be heavier than the mass of the NT higher universe.

So if you're just running out zeros on paper, it's physically possible to write out a googol plex in full form in our universe, even if you had an infinite amount of time to do it, let alone actually counting to it.

The plank volume is the smallest size that we currently understand in physics.

It's such a small space, in fact, that you can fit 100 quintillion plank volumes inside of just a proton.

So if you shrunk your zeros all the way down to the size of the plank volume, how many zeros do you think you could fit then?

Inside of the observable universe?

If the entire universe was filled from top to bottom with tiny plank volume size zeroes, this is the natural limit of numerical expression inside of our universe.

The number of the smallest units of measurement that we know of that can fit inside of the biggest thing that we know of.

Beyond this, it might be literally impossible to contain any more digits and the answer is still pathetically small compared with the size of a googol plex.

You can Onley fit 10 to the 185th plank volumes inside of the observable universe.

To truly appreciate just how gargantuan Lee colossal a Google plucks, actually is.

Try imagining an entire universe beyond our observable universe.

That's a googol plex meters across in every direction.

There are some models of the universe that estimate to the true size of the entire universe beyond what we can simply observe toe actually be closer in size to this.

So if that's true, consider this.

Imagine the volume of space that you occupy, the total number of possible quantum states or arrangements of particles that can occur inside of the space that you take up is vastly, vastly less than a googol plex.

What this implies is that if the actual size of the full universe is actually closer to a googol plex, cubic meters and volume than sheer random probability almost guarantees that there are going to be exact identical copies of you existing somewhere else far away in the same universe.

This is because every possible arrangement of matter inside of a human sized space will likely occur many, many times inside of a universe this big, meaning that everything that could possibly exist would exist and would exist multiple times, meaning multiple versions of people who are identical to you, meaning multiple versions who are only slightly different than you, meaning multiple versions of every single human you've ever known in your life.

Exact copies of every single person you've ever known, heard of, loved or hated all throughout history would still exist somewhere out there, far away.

If the universe actually is this big.

There's almost certainly other versions of you right now doing other things and living their own lives.

And some of them might even be doing something a lot more productive than what you're doing now, like learning more about math and science on brilliance, there are even numbers that air far bigger than a mere googol plex in the realm of mathematics that you can learn all about on brilliant, like this entire section.

That explains the number that makes even a googol plex look tiny called grams number learning.

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