It has 201 digits (it's on the order of 10^200), so it would be about 9.167 googol googol. Yeah, that's incomprehensible. Not the biggest integer I can think of (see Graham's Number) but I'd say it's big enough.
There was a post on HN a few days ago that illustrated U.S. government spending; namely, what does 1 trillion dollars look like.
Apparently 1 trillion dollars is a veritable warehouse of pallets of stacked bills.
Take the 201 digit number; what does that look like as dollar bills laid side-by-side? i.e. how much surface area of the earth could be covered? (if not the whole thing and parts of this galaxy and beyond ;-)).
Just trying to visualize the number to scale.
p.s. reminds me a bit of the Buddha's enlightenment analogies vis-a-vis: take all the grains of sand in the river Ganges; if each grain of sand was a world, and you were to take each grain of sand in each world, even then you would not approach [the scale] of enlightenment -- a 201 digit number is finite, but still, well and truly incomprehensible ;-)
Apparently 1 trillion dollars is a veritable warehouse of pallets of stacked bills.
Take the 201 digit number; what does that look like as dollar bills laid side-by-side? i.e. how much surface area of the earth could be covered? (if not the whole thing and parts of this galaxy and beyond ;-)).
Just trying to visualize the number to scale.
p.s. reminds me a bit of the Buddha's enlightenment analogies vis-a-vis: take all the grains of sand in the river Ganges; if each grain of sand was a world, and you were to take each grain of sand in each world, even then you would not approach [the scale] of enlightenment -- a 201 digit number is finite, but still, well and truly incomprehensible ;-)