a googol
1 ^100 (1 followed by 100 zeroes)
a 9 year old boy came up with the word googol
in 1938 when he was asked to say a word that
described the biggest number he could imagine
it wasn' known at the the time but, coincidentally,
it is also how many years the universe lasts
a googol is a number so big that if you started
writing it down on paper (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 etc.)
there wouldn't be enough space in the universe to finish it
or...
it's how long it would take to move the universe
from one place to another moving one atom a year
and then when that's done doing it again another
1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000
000 000 000 000 times
there weren't any real values back in 1938 that
needed a number that big
since then there are real values that have come to
be known that make a googol look like a fraction 
. . . . . . .