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
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.
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