The biggest thing ever

Here you will find the biggest thing ever. I've written out a googolplex in longhand. That is, 1 followed by exactly a googol zeros.

That's a lot of zeros. More than will fit on your hard disk. More than all the bytes on all the web pages on internet (take that, Google). More zeros than all the cells in all the living things on Earth. More zeros than there are stars in the sky. Yes, that's even more zeros than there are subatomic particles in the visible universe.

It's really big. I'm not kidding.

So I've compressed it for your convenience. Click here to download (36K).

What is a .gz57 file, you ask? It's gzip applied 57 times in a row. To uncompress it, you'll need to do something like the following (UNIX):

$ cat googolplex.gz57 |zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat|zcat
A googolplex =
1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000...

You probably don't want to try to uncompress it directly. It'll fill up your disk by the fourth or fifth decompression, and all the disks in the world not long after that. And you'll still have a long way to go. Similarly, trying to read it directly by the above method will take a while too. You know, like countlessly many times the expected lifespan of the universe.

Instead, quietly contemplate how such a monstrously long number came to be recorded, how unfathomably larger the number it represents must be, and how insignficant your life is in the face of this file.

(But if you do manage to read all the way to the end, you'll find a little afterword from me as well as a copyright notice.)