this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
37 points (100.0% liked)

Today I Learned

3 readers
3 users here now

Post direct links to interesting facts that you just learned about today

founded 1 year ago
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] xilliah@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

About 17 bytes of data. For reference a common size for numbers is 8 bytes. I imagine Nasa has hardware for efficiently handling larger numbers such as 16 bytes and possibly more.

[โ€“] admiralteal@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I mean, so do you. Any common device can handle computation with numbers a lot larger than 8 bytes, using appropriate software. Hell, even Python can handle that pretty routinely.

Very large numbers are used routinely in cryptography.