Can you store a googleplex digitally?

-Job-

Here's an example - please check my math, I'm on my phone.

Given 2^265 (approx 10^80) particles in the universe, suppose we split the particles into groups of three. Each three particles store three distances - these values are independent, given that there are 3 dimensions. Let each distance encode 100 bits, as a low estimate.

Each three particles has 2^300 possible states. Let each group of three particles correspond to a digit, in base 2^300 encoding, a really long alphabet. We can store (2^265)/3 such digits - approx 2^260.

The result would be the enormous value of (2^300)^(2^260).

mfb

They are not independent, they have to satisfy the triangle inequality and 3 particles are always within a plane. But well, that does not matter.

Your result is the number of different states you can encode with this (quite inefficient) way to store data. It can be simplified to ##2^{300*2^{260}} \approx 2^{2^{268}}##. This corresponds to ##2^{268} \approx 5\cdot 10^{80}## bits of storage. Less than a direct position-dependent storage (which needs 4 particles to define a coordinate system, but who cares about 4 out of 10⁸⁰ particles).

akdude1

Theoretically its possible if you had enough things to store information on. Except did this discussion turn into whether or not there are even enough particles in the Universe to store that information.