A Googolplex: a very short story for a very big number

(story for children where I work.)

This is a story about a BIG number. Bigger than one hundred, bigger than one thousand, bigger than one million, or a billion, or even 8 trillion 295 billion 333 million 600 thousand 13. 

One number, that is bigger than all of those others numbers put together, is called a googol. A googol is the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. It's what you get if you multiply 10 times 10 and then multiply that by 10 and then multiply that by 10 and keep doing that until you do it 100 times. You get a 1 with 100 zeroes.

But there's an even bigger number than that and it's called a googolplex. This story is about a googolplex. A googolplex is what you get if you multiplied 10 times 10 but instead of doing that 100 times, you do it a googol times. 

"But Mr.Andy, " you cry, "I don't understand. What is a googolplex?!"

I'll try to give you an idea of how big  googolplex is. Let's say you had a magical sparkly purple backpack.

And then you rounded up all the goats and all the cows and all the wildebeests and all the buffaloes, and all the antelopes, and all the kangaroos in the whole entire world and plucked out all of their hairs one by one and put them in your magical backpack. Now all those animals and hairless and shivering but the number of hairs wouldn't be a googolplex.

And then if you took a book that had all the words you ever said, and all the words you ever read, and all the words you ever wrote or heard, the letters in that books plus all the hairs wouldn't be a googolplex.

-And if you went outside and started ripping out all the grass in your backyard, and all the grass in your neighborhood, and all the grass in the country, and all the grass in North America and South America and Africa and Australia and you went to Antarctica and took all the penguins too and put those blades of grass and penguins in with the words and the hairs, you still wouldn't have a googolplex.

-And so you decide you're going to get in a time machine and go back to when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and giant sharks lived in the ocean, and you meet a magical orangutan named the Great Maleenko. And he gave you a box of chocolates every second of every day of every year until so much time had passed that you were right back in 2013, and you put all those chocolates in your backpack, plus everything else, you still wouldn't have a googolplex.

And then you say, "Okay! Okay! I know what I'll do!" You make a long rope out of pencil shavings, eyelashes, and grains of sand and make it so long that it reaches the Moon and wraps around the Moon ten times and comes back. And then you pull the Moon down to Earth and smash it into little bits and count up the sand and moon bits and pencil shavings, eyelashes, and grains of sand and put all of that in your backpack, you still wouldn't even be anywhere close to a googolplex.

In fact, if you took the whole universe, and filled it completely, until it was bulging, with teeny tiny pieces of paper that said, "I am a sassy hippopotamus" and put all of those pieces of paper in your enormous pretty sparkly backpack, you STILL would not have a googolplex in your backpack.

In the end, a googolplex is just a really really really really really really really really really really really really really big number.  And also you have to clean out your backpack now.