31 Mississippi

From Toby Ordā€™s The Edges of Our Universe:

  • The expansion of space will prevent us from ever affecting 95% of the galaxies we can currently observe.

  • However, our ā€œaffectable universeā€ still contains about 20 billion galaxies, housing at least 10Ā²Ā¹ stars.

Divided equally among Earthā€™s 10 billion people, each personā€™s share of this cosmic endowment would be 100 billion stars.

To count your share, you would need to count by 31 each second for over a century:

31 Mississippi

62 Mississippi

93 Mississippi

124 Mississippi

155 Mississippi

186 Mississippi

217 Mississippi

248 Mississippi

279 Mississippi

310 Mississippi

...

Close-up astronomical photograph showing part of the Andromeda Galaxy, with a bright core transitioning to darker outer regions filled with scattered stars and cosmic dust against a deep space background.
Counting the 117 million visible stars in this close-up of Andromeda galaxy would take about 44 days
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