Comments on: 36,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

By: Paul Hannah

Paul Hannah — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 13:59:45 +0000

Or you could say… for every star in the universe there are about 514,285,714 microbes in the ocean.

By: Mitchell

Mitchell — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 04:22:47 +0000

To emphasize diversity and activity (and our ignorance), describe a single liter of sea water.

To emphasize biomass, compare it to something similarly large and sampleable. “For every animal and plant and tree you see, there’s a similar mass&volume of bacteria somewhere out of sight”.

To emphasize the big picture… “All life is bacterial (to a good first order approximation)”. “We’re just visually biased towards the few rare exceptions.”

By: Allen

Allen — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 22:51:31 +0000

36 nonillion is such a huge number, that it’s basically out of the grasp of the human mind to even imagine such a number of things.

By: TCs

TCs — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 10:09:46 +0000

The shortest way to put it would be 3.6e31 microbes, or the number of water molecules in 1080 tons of water.

By: minusRusty

minusRusty — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 05:17:20 +0000

Hmmm, with numbers that size, it might make sense to group them as 36,000, 000000000, 000000000, 000000000. (Sure, 36 * 10^10 for shorthand or calculations, but billions-grouping might keep the enormity of it in place (all those zeros), while still managing some comprehensibility beyond “a bunch of zeros, let’s count them up”.

Just a thought.

-Rusty