Nonsensical discussion of counting to astronomically large numbers and literary outputs

Knowledge 131 Easy! No, unfortunately. The problem is subtler than it first appears. First it will take a VEEEEERRRY long time. If I counted up from one, I would print out War and Peace eventually but it would take 120 billion, billion, billion, billion, billion... (I would need the entire length of this book to write out all the billions) years! For the physicists amongst you, I would need 10°” years, assuming I could use every atom in the known universe counting in parallel at the plank interval. “The plank interval is the shortest time that can exist in the Universe as a discrete ‘tick. Even going at this speed using with every atom in the known Universe would take 10°° longer than the age of the Universe. This is stupendously long. Remember scientific notation means I have a 1 with 5000 zeroes after it. It is a deceptive notation as something as innocuous as 10'”° is equal to the number of atoms in the known universe. 10° is an absolutely enormous number. If you hear something is going to ‘take until the end of time; we're talking a lot longer than that! You may have spotted that in the process of counting up to the War and Peace number we also count through EVERY book ever written shorter than 500,000 words in all the world’s languages. Interestingly we counted through the Japanese and Chinese translations of War and Peace quite a bit before we reached the English and finally French translations. During the process, we also stepped through countless other wonderful works: proofs of amazing theorems, the complete works of William Shakespeare, and every composition ever written. Sadly, we never knew it. The problem is my program never stopped and told me it had found any of these wonderful things. I would have to sit staring at the screen to spot them. If I was off doing something else — making a cup of tea, taking the kids to school - I would miss all these wonders; the program never tells me if it has succeeded, but quietly prints out War and Peace and carries on. This is really annoying. It’s not a useful machine. What I need is a machine that rings a bell when it finds something interesting so I can break away from what I am doing and take a look. Reading every book it writes in every language and all the nonsense in between would take a ginormous amount of my time. (By-the-way, contrary to statements by school teachers that ginormous is not a word — it is!) I want a computer to come up with War and Peace without me having to do all the work. It’s no help if the machine writes everything down and lets me take a look in my own good time. That only puts off the time when I have to begin reading all the gibberish it produced. Another practical problem is the massive storage required. Just imagine the immense piles of printer HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015821