Is this not all, on the whole, contingent upon our technology?
I picture an altered (and very unnatural) brain capable of somehow "counting" beyond that. Picture handling 10k values in each "count"
Ugh, oh how great concepts breed great concepts.
Cheers and thanks again.
@rythur @sophieschmieg @bnut @demofox There are two problems with counting to 2^256 (~1.158*10^77): time and energy.
• Even if a computer could go through one number every Planck time (~10^-43 seconds), it would still take ~10^34 seconds to go through all of them. There are 3.154*10^7 seconds per year, so that impossibly fast computer would take about 3*10^26 years. The universe is believed to be ~1.38*10^10 years old.
• The energy required to go through all of the state changes in an ideal 256-bit register would be greater than the total expected lifetime output of the sun. I forget the math on just how much greater.
@bob_zim @sophieschmieg @bnut @demofox
Quite badass an approach to it's impossibility, but I mean something like "batches over time" or "X multicounting per batch" -- still, is this even counting. When we think of it, that's one, two, three; but it could be all three at once to some other being somewhere, or an artificial machine. Energy is still an issue here, unless we employ, as I've said elsewhere "cooling tech" whereby the tech works by essentially cooling itself. Cheers o the impossible!
Oct 29, 2026, 6:12 AM@bob_zim @rythur @sophieschmieg @demofox in case you’re interested, it’s believed that we can continue to produce entropy (do stuff) for another 10^100 years. So I guess we’d need 501 bits to count stuff sequentially (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe#Time_frame_for_heat_death ). Although there’s only 3.28x10^80 particles in the currently observable universe, so who knows what we’re counting.
@bnut @bob_zim @sophieschmieg @demofox
Now you have me picturing a film in which the world/universe is saved against entropy, like Interstellar did with time. In general then, and in the absence of being saved in this way, we can only count so high, which of course goes back to the beauty of finitism.
So, our path to living forever has to be Climate > Time > Entropy.
I bet there's still much we don't understand at all about the exhaustive counts of things, like particles. Ugh!
Oct 29, 2026, 6:41 AM@rythur if you like this sort of thing you may like to read “the 3 body problem”
I've definitely read about the three-body, was working on coming up with a more complicated variant, involving negative energy balances, when I started noticing my house being broken into. Now, I'm targeted and homeless. Lol. Maybe someone didn't like the diagrams???
Either way, thanks!
The N-Body is just plain super-monkey stuff BTW.
Cheers!
Oct 29, 2026, 7:04 AM@rythur I’m sorry that happened. Just to clarify though, the three body problem I’m referring to is a fictional book that heavily features the math problem
Ohhhhh. Didn't know there was a book. I'll scope it out. But, yeah, coordinated harassment is terrible, those doing it have no soul. One will take pics of the car, the next will get in, and then Stasi damages. Real unfortunate times. But I'll scope the book!
Thanks :-)
@bnut With a count that large, obviously you have to recount all the particles a few times to be sure!