🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2431@phri.UUCP>, roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) writes:
> 	No, physicists don't usually think in binary, and no, I didn't mean
> 10^200th.  A physicist would say there are about 10^40 electrons and a
> computer scientist would call that about 2^200 because it's more useful
> that way.  And please, no nitpicking from people claiming these numbers are
> off by an order of magnitude or two.
> -- 
> Roy Smith, {allegra,philabs}!phri!roy
> System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute
> 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016

I don't see any smiley faces so:

Let's use water.  Water has an atomic weight of about 18, weighs about
1 gram per cubic centimeter, and has 10 electrons per molecule.  Avagadros
number is 6.023E23.

In 1 cubic meter of water there are about 1E6 grams.  At 1/18 moles/gram 
one cubic meter of water has about 55556 moles and multiplying by 
Avagadro's number yields 3.3E28 molecules or 3.3E29 electrons per cubic
meter of water.

That means that in 1 cubic mile of water there are about 1.38E39 electrons
and you only need about 7.2 cubic miles of water to get 10^40 electrons.
And that is pure water.  Who knows just how many electrons there are in
a cubic mile of sea water.  I think there are more than 7.2 cubic miles
of water on this earth which is just a very small fraction of the mass
of the sun which is a very small fraction of the mass of the galaxy which
is a very small fraction of the universe which we know about which MAY
well be just a very small fraction of all that exists if there is even any
limit on that!  The point is that any universe with only 10^40 electrons
must exist in a Dr. Seus book (Horton Hears a Who I believe).  Besides, 
if we need more mass, we can take all the energy produced by the sun for
a year and convert it to water and have enough electrons to make lots
of memory.  Maybe that is what caused the ice age.  Some Net.arch fanatic
commandeered the sun for a century or two to get enough energy to make
enough mass to make a memory bank for his Cray 3E24 or whatever. 
I bet he didn't use paging either :->.  Probably didn't use unix!!  

John Blankenagel