From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Dec 11 00:51:07 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id AAA20644 for hackers-outgoing; Thu, 11 Dec 1997 00:51:07 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-hackers) Received: from acroal.com (firewall0.acroal.com [209.24.61.154]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id AAA20637 for ; Thu, 11 Dec 1997 00:51:02 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from jamil@acroal.com) Received: from localhost (jamil@localhost) by acroal.com (8.8.8/8.8.7) with SMTP id AAA29874 for ; Thu, 11 Dec 1997 00:41:09 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from jamil@acroal.com) Date: Thu, 11 Dec 1997 00:41:09 -0800 (PST) From: "J. Weatherbee - Senior Systems Architect" To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: This IS relevant, you'll realize why later. Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Does anyone have any numbers for the sum total amount of information existing in the universe? I would guess the appropriate way to tablulate this would be to take the total ammount of matter in the form of subatomic particles, and energy is photons and account for their position in three coordinates and velocity vector. I'm certainly no physicist, but from what I've read there are *NO* numbers for the ammount of matter in the universe just percentage approximations. My guess is that you could account for this all in less than 2^1000 bits = 10^300, what this essentially means to me is that it would be impractical to build a machine with a word size expressed with more that 1024 bits (the expression of the word size, not the wordsize itself).