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Order of magnitude (numbers)

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This is a placeholder page for a comparison of various scales of finite numbers, including counts of things and dimensionless numbers.

10²⁴[?]
- there are roughly 6.022×10²³ atoms in a gram of hydrogen
10²¹[?]
- 4.3 x 10¹⁹ different positions of a Rubik's Cube
10¹⁸[?]
- it has been estimated that all the world's beaches put together hold roughly 2 × 10¹⁵ grains of sand
10¹⁵[?]
10¹²[?]
- approximately 4×10¹¹ stars in the Milky Way galaxy
- between 1 × 10¹⁰ and 8 × 10¹⁰ galaxies in the observable (as of 2003) Universe
- approximately 6×10⁹ human beings living in 2003
- approximately 3×10⁹ web pages indexed by Google in 2003
- approximately 3×10⁹ base pairs in the human genome
10⁹[?]
- Cataloged stars: The Guide Star Catalog II[?] has entries on 998,402,801 distinct astronomical objects
- Books: The British Library claims that it holds over 150 million items. The Library of Congress claims that it holds approximately 119 million items.
- Geographic places: The NIMA GEOnet Names Server[?] contains approximately 3.88 million named geographical features outside the United States, with 5.34 million names. The USGS Geographic Names Information System[?] claims to have almost 2 million physical and cultural geographic features within the United States.
- Species: The World Resources Institute[?] claims that approximately 1.4 million species have been named, out of an unknown number of total species (estimates range between 2 and 100 million species).
10⁶[?]
- The freedb database holds information for around 700,000 different compact discs
- 564,000 words in War and Peace
- English words: The New Oxford Dictionary of English claims to contain 350,000 definitions for English words
10⁵
- Each human being is estimated to have 30,000 to 40,000 genes
- There are 20,000 - 40,000 Chinese characters, depending on how you count them
10⁴[?]
10³[?]
- there were 191 Member States of the United Nations as of 2003
- there are 26 letters in the Latin alphabet
10²[?]
10¹[?]
- there are 10 fingers on a pair of human hands
- 7 ± 2, in cognitive science, George A. Miller[?]'s estimate of the number of objects that can be simultaneously thought of by the human mind
- π, the ratio of a circle's diameter to its circumference
- e, the base of the natural logarithms
- φ, the golden mean
one
10^-1[?]
10^-2[?]
- α = 0.007 297 352 533(27), the fine structure constant
10^-3[?]
10^-6[?]
10^-9[?]
10^-12[?]
10^-15[?]
10^-18[?]
10^-21[?]
10^-24[?]