Eli5 The scale of 18 quintillion

Question

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

Answer 1

> 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.