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
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.
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