a million a second for each second of the cosmos’s 14 billion years

Forget counting grains of sand. Count the stars.

“In his 1988 book Coming of Age in the Milky Way, the science writer Timothy Ferris supposed there were so many stars that to spend one second contemplating each star in creation would require as long as the universe has existed. The star count has shot up so much just since 1988 that at 200 sextillion, you would need to contemplate a million stars per second, for as long as the cosmos has been here, to contemplate them all.”

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