The Universe is endlessly expansive; as a species, we’re not entirely sure what – or how much of it – is out there, and this is something which Hello Games are hoping to recreate in their procedurally generated space exploration game, No Man’s Sky.
But all algorithms have a limit, and since Hello Games use a 64-bit number to generate their planets, that means their limit is 2 to the power of 64 or 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets, that’s over 18 quintillion, something which I can’t quite process.
That’s still not infinite, but it would take five billion years to spend just one second on each planet, making it impossible to explore them all before the sun burns out in 4.6 billion years.
No Man’s Sky is coming to PS4 and PC at some point in the future. It’s going to be huge, and I can’t wait. Just stay away from this one if you’re a completionist.
Severn2j
Wait, is NMS simulating a galaxy here, or the whole universe? Even if every star in our galaxy (300 billion of them) had the same number of planets as our own, that’s still only just under 2.5 trillion..
Not complaining, but it really should be filed in the same cabinet as Borderlands 35 squijillion guns (or whatever the actual number was).
MrYd
Look at my earlier comment. I was assuming 100 billion stars in each of 100 billion galaxies in the universe and 5 planets around each star. That made this 2^64 planets around 0.04% of the number of planets in the real universe. Or the number of planets in around 37 million real galaxies.
I went for the lower end of the estimates on number of galaxies and number of stars in a galaxy. 100-300 billion for each sounds plausible. 5 might be a bit high for the number of planets around each star. Nothing to suggest our 8 planets is anything special in the universe, but some stars may have no planets. 2 or 3 sounds like an absolute minimum average number of planets.
Either way, that 0.04% of the number of planets in the universe being in the game is probably a pretty good guess. Within an order of magnitude of the real number. Could be 0.4% of the universe, could be 0.004%. Definitely more planets than a real galaxy would have, by quite a large margin, and definitely some tiny fraction of the planets in the entire real universe.