4 ms·
I thought up a few ways to visualize 2^64 unique items: - You could give every ant on Earth ~920 unique IDs without any collisions - You could give unique IDs
by bdn_ 4y ago
I thought up a few ways to visualize 2^64 unique items:
- You could give every ant on Earth ~920 unique IDs without any collisions
- You could give unique IDs for every brain neuron for all ~215 million people in Brazil
- The ocean contains about 20 × (2^64) gallons of water (3.5267 × 10^20 gallons total)
- There are between 100-400 billion stars in the Milky Way, so you could assign each star between 46,000,000–184,000,000 unique IDs each
- You could assign ~2.5 unique IDs to each grain of sand on Earth
- If every cell of your body contained a city with 500,000 people each, every "citizen" of your body could have a unique ID without any collisions
Calculating these figures is actually a lot of fun!
- Eduard 4y agoThere are only ~368 grains of sand per ant?
- ManuelKiessling 4y agoNo wonder I keep reading about sand shortages.
- fragmede 4y agoWell no. See there's this one ant, Jeff, that's hogging them all for itself, so each ant only gets 50 grains grains of sand.
- jwilk 4y agoThe common claim that there are ~7.5E18 (~2.5 × 2⁶⁴) grains of sand seems to originate from this back-of-the-envelope calculation: https://web.archive.org/web/19990117001023/http://www2.hawaii.edu/suremath/jsand.html https://web.archive.org/web/19990117001023/http://www2.hawai... It takes only beach sand into account, and of course there's a lot of guessing involved. It could be easily off by many orders of magnitude.
- tonnydourado 4y agoThose are great examples
- PaulHoule 4y agoI think multiplying (1000 unique identifiers) isn’t fair but I like the gallons.