Blogtrek

Inconceivable disk drive

In my mathematics page, I describe several levels of numbers. In particular, literary numbers are numbers written with between one hundred and twenty billion zeroes after a 1. I call them literary because literary works can be thought of as big numbers, if you assign a value to the digits and use place notation. Literary numbers are also the numbers of disk drives. If a computer's disk drive has 340 MB of storage, then the number of possible configurations of that disk drive is about 10 to the billionth power, a 1 followed by a billion zeros. It would fill 8 encyclopedias. My current disk drive has 80 GB of storage. That is really huge! There is no way I will know everything about this computer. The number of configurations of that drive is about 1 followed by 34 billion zeroes. That exceeds the limit of 20 billion zeroes that literary numbers have. This number is inconceivable instead. Just think of it. I am typing this on an inconceivable computer, a computer with an inconceivable number of configurations. We have yet to see an inconceivable tornado, but we are seeing inconceivable computers. There is no way I will know everything on this computer. Computers have come to the place where they have taken an independent existence, above and beyond what our minds can conceive. It's a little scary. Could a world controlled by computers be around the corner?