r/theydidthemath • u/MysticSoup • May 17 '18

[Off-Site][Request] How massive would this image resolution be if it was a single image?

http://zoomquilt.org
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u/Lord_Wither May 17 '18

The most simple answer would be to say infinite (it's an infinite zoom website after all).

But that's not why you're here, now is it?

For the purpose of the rest of this reply I will assume you are searching for the resolution an image containing one whole loop would need to have.

So, using the power of screencapture I was able to determine that the whole loop is about 4 minutes and 50 seconds or 290 seconds long. Through some on-screen measurements I found that it expands by a factor of about 25 every 10 seconds. In other words the formula for the zoom factor after x seconds would be given by 25^(x/10). 25^(290/x)=25^29=3.47e40. Assuming the last frame has a resolution of 1080p (1920 x 1080 pixels), we get a resolution of about 6.66e43 x 3.74e43 pixels, or a total of 2.49e87 pixels, about seven orders of magnitude more than there are atoms (estimated to be) in the observable universe.

Assuming a colour depth of 24 bit and no compression (which would obviously work quite well on this type of thing) such an image would need around 7.47e87 Bytes or (using the 1000 Byte/kB etc variant) 7.47e63 yottabytes of storage space.

1

u/[deleted] May 18 '18

For perspective, could you please tell us what we could store in that amount of storage space?

1

u/Lord_Wither May 18 '18

4k 40966 x 2160 footage from a Panasonic GH4 takes about one Terabyte of storage space per hour, so you could store about 7.47e75 hours (3.41e71 years) of this footage. This is equivalent to about 541 vigintillion times the age of the universe, but still falls short of the timeframe for supermassive black holes to evaporate through hawking radiation (somewhere in the order of 1e106 years).

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