Bigness (Part 3)

Last time I talked about a 200-terabyte proof, completed in 2016, that the journal Nature called the largest ever. But Michael Nielsen pointed me to a vastly longer proof from 2012. This one required about 60,000,000 terabytesthat is, 60 exabytes! So, they were unable to store the whole proof.

Lets pause to contemplate what 60 exabytes amounts to. Its been estimated that all words ever spoken by human beings, if transcribed into text, would take just 5 exabytes to store. As of 2020, the...