First I will put a link to this page: The Deep Sky Frontier Q: How BIG is this page? A: This page is 9 quadrillion pixels wide by 9 quadrillion pixels tall. Thus it contains a large number of pixels: 8,100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 otherwise known as 8.1 nonillion. In scientific notation, that's 8.1x10^30, hereafter shown in the form 8.1e30. This means that the repeating background image has 5.4e28 stars on it-- about as many as there would be if our universe was multiplied to a million times it's current observable size. Futhermore, at 77 pixels to the inch, this page takes up 3.4e18 square miles and is 1.844 billion miles on a side-- an area roughly equivalent to a section of the plane of our Solar System with the sun at the center and the orbit of Saturn on the outside edge (a square 22 AU on a side). That's about 17 billion times the surface area of the Earth. Test it for yourself. Using the arrow keys to scroll, see if you can move the scroll button even one pixel. On second thought, don't-- especially if you're the doggedly persistent type. To do so will take about seven times longer than How big is this page? Press F11 to optomize your view. Here's another way to imagine the size of this webpage. Let us exaggerate outrageously and say that a trillion books might have been written during the history of the world (a figure more in line with all reading that has ever been done), and that each of those trillion books has an extremely generous allotment of 10,000 pages. Let us then say that each of those pages has an average size of about one square foot. That would mean that this webpage would have ten trillion times the space necessary to fit it all in. If you were to do a random search of this webpage at a rate of ten pageviews per second, it would take you about 31,000 years-- on average-- before you would find even a single page of even one of those books. And here's another way to look at it. The World Wide Web is currently the biggest part of the internet-- and it is huge. Google currently knows of over 8 billion webpages-- and there are certainly a great many pages that Google does not know about. There are an unknowable number that have come and gone and will never be seen again. Let us imagine that there have been a total of a twenty billion webpages each year since 1990-- a gross overestimation (at least in regard to the early days). Let us then imagine that each of those webpages was at least 25,000 pixels long and 1,000 pixels wide-- equivalent to about twenty-five pages of writing. Given these figures, this one page would have enough raw area to house a quadrillion years worth of the World Wide Web. If you were to search randomly at a rate of ten pageviews per second, it would take you 3 million years-- on average-- to find even just one of those twenty billion pages. If you'd like, you can support this page with a very small donation (between 89 cents and a $2.33 would be shiny). Include a short comment as your "shipping address"-- anything-- and I'll place it in the vastness. You can also support this by rating with a thumb-up on StumbleUpon and by telling your friends. Would you like to visit the exact center? (Only works properly with Mozilla Firefox) _your natural lifespan. This method causes you to "move" across the plane of this page at the equivalent of a toddler's walking pace-- around 0.5 mph. At this rate, it would take you half a million years to cross from one end to the other. As you may know, it is enormously quicker to use the mouse and click on the empty part of the scroll bar and then hold down the mouse button. Using this method, you would be able to cross in about 100 minutes. Doing so causes you to move at about Warp 1.5-- a virtual velocity of over 1.5 times the speed of light (ignoring relativistic effects). If you try it, you'll see that the background starfield appears to be going by at no more than ten miles an hour. In actuality, the glimpses you are seeing of the starfield are tens of thousands of miles apart. Enormous expanses are being skipped over completely. Of course, it is far quicker to use the mouse to grab the scroll button and slide it over. Not as quick as using this link, however: To the Corner. Click here for another angle on how big this page is. Note: While this page is very, very large when viewed using Internet Explorer and others, you need Mozilla Firefox to view it properly. Firefox is the open-source phoenix of once-defeated Netscape. It offers improved speed, security, and simplicity. It's tabs feature alone makes it worth switching. It's free.
