Amazing Calculation

It is very interesting Calculation.
Please DO IT!

13837 * your age * 73 = ?

Was it amazing ?

If you remember, I once made a thread asking how long of a sentence would it be if we were to convinced all of the characters ever written in history, be it handwritten, typed or printed. This includes symbols and books and the internet and text messages...

Well, I felt somewhat experimental today and I decided to take a shot at this question, me being the curious guy that I am inside.

I did a few estimates, my first and most important one being that I would ignore all text written before 1990, which was the birth of the internet. It's an underestimate, yes, but not by much. The internet has had an amazing impact on society and whatever came before it (in terms of how many words have been written) is just negligible, IMO.

Next, I considered text messaging as a big factor.

And then came taking on data. I used Google for that.

For example...

In 2007, a director at Google made an educated guess that there were 100 trillion words on the internet. Also, by 2010, said one article, a total of 2.3 trillion text messages have been sent.

I looked up averages to both pieces of information and I got that the average word length is 5-6 letters, while the average text message length is 80 characters.


100 trillion words equals 500-600 trillion characters— without spaces, that is.
2.3 trillion text messages at an average of 80 characters per message equals 184 trillion characters, including spaces.


Perhaps it’s a little far-fetched to do this, but let’s say there’s a space for each word, so that should bring us to 1000-1200 trillion characters for our first estimate (rounding 184 to 200 for simplicity purposes, of course).

Our final total would be an average of 1300 trillion characters.

This is the amount of characters that has been typed by people into their keyboards and phones since the birth of both internet and text messaging. It’s obviously going to be an underestimate, since I didn’t use present-day information.

To continue, we’d measure the characters themselves. I used a font size converter, so I could convert different font sizes into metric system measurements. The most commonly used font, I would assume, has a size between 12 and 16, which is 4.2-5.6 millimeters. This averages at 5 millimeters per character. Multiplying this with the number of average characters, we result with a product of 6500 trillion millimeters.

We can convert that to Earth-to-Sun distances (AU) for a better picture of what kind of distances we’re dealing with, and we get back 43.45 AU.

This is about the same distance as Pluto is from the Sun, which is pretty interesting, don’t you think?