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One of the earliest examples of this is The Sand Reckoner, in which Archimedes gave a system for naming large numbers. To do this, he called the numbers up to a myriad myriad (10 8) "first numbers" and called 10 8 itself the "unit of the second numbers".
It is a ratio in the order of about 10 80 to 10 90, or at most one ten-billionth of a googol (0.00000001% of a googol). Carl Sagan pointed out that the total number of elementary particles in the universe is around 10 80 (the Eddington number ) and that if the whole universe were packed with neutrons so that there would be no empty space ...
In the PBS science program Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, Episode 9: "The Lives of the Stars", astronomer and television personality Carl Sagan estimated that writing a googolplex in full decimal form (i.e., "10,000,000,000...") would be physically impossible, since doing so would require more space than is available in the known universe.
In fact, his monthly PayPal statement showed a negative balance of more than $92 quadrillion, which would have made him more than 5,500 times more indebted than the United States government.
For example, "one million" is clearly definite, but "a million" could be used to mean either a definite (she has a million followers now) or an indefinite value (she signed what felt like a million papers). The title The Book of One Thousand and One Nights (lit. "a thousand nights and one night") impiles a large number of nights. [22]
Later, French arithmeticians changed the words' meanings, adopting the short scale definition whereby three zeros rather than six were added at each step, so a billion came to denote a thousand million (10 9), a trillion became a million million (10 12), and so on. This new convention was adopted in the United States in the 19th century, but ...
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(1 000 000 000 000 000; 1000 5; short scale: one quadrillion; long scale: one thousand billion, or one billiard) ISO: peta- (P) Biology – Insects : 1,000,000,000,000,000 to 10,000,000,000,000,000 (10 15 to 10 16 ) – The estimated total number of ants on Earth alive at any one time (their biomass is approximately equal to the total biomass ...