I recently got into no man’s sky and heard the estimated number of planets (as above) I was floored but felt it’s larger than I’m grasping it and even larger than the way I explain it to others.
I recall from a tiktok or something that if everyone in the world played the game and found a planet 24/7, 365.2425 days, it would take approx 15000 years to find every single planet
Edit: these analogies are super helpful, thank you so much!
Is my time scale accurate also?
In: 25
Imagine that every grain of sand on Earth is a planet. The current estimate for grains of sand is 7.5 quintillion. There are 2.4x as many planets in NMS than grains of sand on our planet.
Assuming a human lives to 100 years they will live for 3,155,695,200 seconds.
Assuming the earth has 7 billion people who will live for those 100 years, that will be 22,089,866,000,000,000,000 seconds.
That number is 22 quintillion.
18 quintillion seconds is longer than the universe has existed.
If you were to travel 18 quintillion centimeters that would be 1,900,000 million lightyears. That is about 20 milky way galaxies edge to edge.
18 quintillion isn’t a lot. I mean, it’s just 1.8 * 10^19.
For comparison, there are 10^40 legal chess positions (and over 10^123 illegal ones).
When you have a seemingly small number of variables, (say 64 squares) and a seemingly small number of possible pieces (16 black and 16 white pieces), it suddenly gets very “big” only when you multiply out all the possibilities.
If your planet can be red, blue, orange, green, or yellow, and be snowy, rainy, or dry, and be big, medium, or small, and so on, it’s pretty easy to come up with 18 quintillion combinations from a seemingly small array of possibilities. The planets are just procedurally generated from this small combination of possible factors, leaving you with a seemingly endless (yet entirely bounded) number of possibilities.
Lets put it this way:
If you started counting seconds from the big bang and continued counting all though the present day and then continue until the sun swallowed the earth, you would only be two third into your first Quintillion of seconds.
Since all the answers here are to imagine something huge and amazing, ive decided to reduce 18 quintillion into something small and boring!
So imagine you have 25x 6-sided dies each with a unique color. This will give you roughly the same amount of possible combinations of numbers and colors as there are planets in no-mans sky. You can keep throwing those dice over and over to forever see a new never before seen result, but you will soon realize that the difference arent that big between throw’s, nothing to get excited about even if every throw we do lands a new combination.
Its the same with the game, there is no need to explore all those quintillion planets just as there are no need to throw that set of dice a quintillion times just to have seen them all 😀
It’s important to remember that not only do those planets not exist in the game, the *number itself* doesn’t exist in the game. It’s an entirely hypothetical number, the number of unique planets the engine can generate, if given a ludicrous amount of time.
There’s not some No Man’s Sky database somewhere that stores quintillions of planets, or even quintillions of seeds to generate planets. Even just storing the full number of possible seeds would take insane amounts of storage.
When players in No Man’s Sky encounter a new system, a seed is randomly generated, which in turn is used to generate the planets in the system.
> Is my time scale accurate also?
Google is able to interpret written numbers so it’s useful for checking these kind of things, so “18 quintillion / 8 billion” is “two billion two hundred fifty million”, so that’s how many planets there are per person on earth.
Lets say for each planet it takes around 1 minute on average to land on a planet (with warping to the system and traveling between planets).
Again Google will happily answer “two billion two hundred fifty million minutes in years” is 4280.8 years.
So your figure is around the right amount, maybe it’s assuming fewer players (babies can’t play!) or longer time traveling between planets.
Another comparaison is “descriptions”.
The English language has roughly 470,000 words, so take 5,000 of them that are relevant for describing planets and their ecosystem (and different enough from one another). We will call those words “keywords”.
If it takes 6 keywords to describe a planet, the number of different planets you can describe is 21 quintillions, so slightly more than man’s sky
And that’s probably what no man’s sky is doing. Each planet is generated by X keywords chosen among N possibilities:
* So 6 keywords among 4850 possibilities
* Or 10 keywords among 387 possibilities
* Or 14 keywords among 151 possibilities
* Or many other combinations
And as you see, the more detailed are the planets, the easier it is to reach 18 quintillions.
Another way to see it is that the amount of things the language can describe is unimaginably large. Take a small paragraph of a few lines, and there is already much more than quintillions of different paragraphs you could have written.
So you’re probably familiar with a million, billion and trillion. Consider that a trillion is a million millions. A quintillion is a million trillions
18 quitinllion is essentially a 1 followed by 18 zeros, so essentially a 20 digit number. If we can all agree that the universe is approximately 14 billion years old , the age of the universe in seconds is a 23 digit number. It’s big. Really big
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