Stars or Transistors: Which Outnumbers the Other in Our Universe?

[Kholdstare]

This thing just popped into my head last night while describing to a friend, possible end of our universe.

Which one is higher? the number of stars in our universe or the number of MOSFETs we mass-fabricated in our civilization ?

My guess is though number of stars. What do you think? (consider current number of MOSFETs should be also an intimidating number.)

Any rough statistics on this matter will also be very enlighting.

 

[Drakkith]

The number of stars is unknown, but could be infinite.

 

[FailedLaunch]

Which one is higher? the number of stars in our universe or the number of MOSFETs we mass-fabricated in our civilization ?

I think you underestimate the number of stars in universe. Supposedly there is about 10^22 -10^24 stars (see below). I don't know how many MOSFETs have people ever produced. Say a high-end CPU has a few million gates. (10^7). People have produced ~10 billion processors (10^10) so you are somewhere around 10^17, say 10^20 with other electronics, which is still a few orders less then the number of stars.

Did I get the orders right?

Wikipedia: Observable universe

 

[FailedLaunch]

End of the universe

This thing just popped into my head last night while describing to a friend, possible end of our universe.

.. of course you can always tell him all the scientific theories about the ultimate end of the universe.

 

[Antiphon]

On the basis of the numbers presented, MOSFETs win or soon will.

There are 6.8 billion transistors in a large FPGA. A large Intel server processor has upwards of 2.5 billion. 8 gigs of ram? More than 8 billion.

Such ICs (together with many more smaller ones) are fabricated by the billions per year and are fielded for many years.

 

[Kholdstare]

@FailedLaunch - I did not underestimate star count, haha. You can read my answer in the first post.

That link was good. However, there's a much better link (arranged in tabular form) somewhere I don't remember now.