LRT: The idea of adding to infinity ("you can't do it, you'd still be adding when the sun went out") has me thinking of that short story I wrote where an immortal being trapped in an endless void tries to count to infinity to pass the time and eventually runs out of named numbers
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It knows about googolplex but it can't actually keep counting up to it because there's such an incomprehensible expanse of nameless numbers between the highest sequential named number and googolplex
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I ran a calculation kinda to see if orally counting to the highest conventionally named number, with full enunciation of all the syllables, would take longer than the heat-death of the universe and I can't remember if it would but like it's up there
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Replying to @Nymphomachy
Mathematicians who talk about infinity like to use the term "almost all" in this trolling way Like if there's any finite subset of an infinite set then "almost all" members of the infinite set are not in the subset
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
The definition of "infinite" means that compared to it any finite number at all -- zero, one, 42, a googolplex, Graham's number -- is equivalent It's all the same as zero Your character hadn't even actually started to count
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
So, like, almost all natural numbers are so large they are completely impossible to express by any means within the physical universe
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
*Moreover*, the term "almost all" is still used this way when we jump up a level from countable to uncountable infinity Almost all real numbers are non-integers, almost all real numbers are irrational, almost all real numbers are non-constructible, non-algebraic, non-analytic,
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And indeed almost all real numbers are non-computable I.e. almost all real numbers cannot be named using the rules of arithmetic, geometry, algebra, calculus Even if you had an infinitely large universe and infinite time, almost all of them can't be expressed *in principle*
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