• Voroxpete
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    1 month ago

    For the record the “change” from that deal would be, measured to any reasonable degree of accuracy, exactly one googol.

    It’s really really hard to explain how numbers that big work.

    Basically if you had ten trillion dollars, and you spent one single cent, you would have spent a greater proportion of your wealth than that fine would be as a proportion of one googol dollars.

    And just to really put all that in perspective, let’s talk about how big that fine actually is.

    It’s frequently said that it’s more than the entire world’s GDP, but that’s not even close. Imagine if every single planet (not “habitable planet”, just “planet”) in our galaxy - all eight trillion of them - was terraformed to support life. Imagine if all of them had a population and economy like Earth. The entire galaxy’s GDP wouldn’t be enough.

    In fact, a hundred of those galaxies wouldn’t be enough. A thousand wouldn’t be enough. A hundred thousand wouldn’t be enough. It would take 20 million of those galaxies to pay that fine (at the time of reporting; by now its more galaxies than exist in all the known universe, because it doubles every day).

    And all of that would still be a rounding error to a rounding error against one googol.