What is a really long number?

Answer 1

A really long number is any number that you don't want to write out by hand. We have named a few really long numbers. If you are a young person who isn't able to write for very long, a quadrillion might seem like a really long number. Most people agree that a googol is a really long number. Google made up their name so that they could copyright it, but googol was what they were thinking of when they did it. A googol is a number that is so long, that it has 100 zeroes after the first digit, which is a 1. This is not nearly as large as numbers can get. A googolplex is a googol to the googol power, or, a very long number that is described by 10,000 zeroes after the first digit, which is a 1. I've never seen anybody write out a googolplex by hand. All numbers bigger than 10x a googolplex are even longer, but we don't exactly have names for most of them. There would be little point, as we don't even know of many things that such a large number would describe. Someday, we'll know more about the universe and we'll be making up more names for such numbers, as there will be something that we want to talk about that is very large.