Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!uwvax!oddjob!hao!ames!amdahl!oliveb!sun!falk From: falk@sun.uucp (Ed Falk) Newsgroups: sci.crypt Subject: Re: NSA advertisment Message-ID: <36402@sun.uucp> Date: 14 Dec 87 18:13:58 GMT References: <4781@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> <139@piring.cwi.nl> Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc. - Mtn View, CA Lines: 32 Summary: c'mon people, do the math. palmer@tybalt.caltech.edu.UUCP (David Palmer) writes: >I just read a magazine add seeking people to work at the NSA (pg. 80R of >Dec. 1987 IEEE Spectrum) >The graphic is 10,000,0... (100 zeros) written on three lines. The first >paragraph of the text reads: > You're looking at a "googol." Ten raised to the 100th power. > One followed by 100 zeros. Counting 24 hours a day, you would > need 120 years to reach a googol. Two lifetimes. It's a > number that's impossible to grasp. A number beyond our imagination. >... material deleted ... When I was in junior high, I worked out a similar problem... Just now, with a stop-watch, I determined that it takes me 3 seconds to recite a 9-digit number to myself. That includes reciting the words 'million' and 'thousand'. I assume that reciting a 99-digit word would take 33 seconds. The 100-digit numbers and 99-digit numbers are 99% of all the numbers you recite on the way there, so we don't have to worry about the smaller numbers. Therefore, it takes slightly more than .99 * 33 * 10^100 seconds to count to a 100-digit number. That's 1.04*10^94 years. This is somewhat more than two lifetimes. It's even more than two lifetimes of the universe. I wouldn't be surprised if it was more than the number of elementary particles in the universe. -- -ed falk, sun microsystems sun!falk, falk@sun.com terrorist, cryptography, DES, drugs, cipher, secret, decode, NSA, CIA, NRO.