Eli5 The scale of 18 quintillion

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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

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Anonymous 0 Comments

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 😀

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