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No. 593: Big Numbers

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Big Numbers

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Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/itoons/?comic=593

Strip by: Mathy

Miss Lenhart: Biology is hard because there’s so much of it. Earth hosts about 10 exa-exabytes worth of DNA.
Cueball: What’s an exa-exabyte?
Miss Lenhart: It’s 1036 bytes.
Cueball: How do I picture that?
Miss Lenhart: Imagine you had an exabyte of data, but each byte contained an exabyte of data.
Cueball: I can’t even picture what an exabyte is.
Miss Lenhart: It’s 1018 bytes.
Cueball: But how do I picture 1018?
Megan: Very carefully.
Cueball: Cool, got it.
Miss Lenhart: No!

The author writes:

The universal answer to “how” questions.

Original xkcd strip: 2020-03-20.