"There are stories of trips to the Moon and other planets, and even mention of conflicts, but these are just that: trips. "There was no motivation to imagine us going elsewhere and settling otherwise uninhabited spaces," he says. As he wrote recently, if people imagined other worlds, they pictured other civilisations living there, rather than barren planets within a bleak, empty vacuum.
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Until the late 1800s and early 20th Century, scholars "felt the Universe was full of value and humanoids", says Thomas Moynihan, who studies intellectual history at the University of Oxford. It's hard to imagine today, but people didn't always believe the Universe was unpopulated, and open to potential settlement. The belief that galactic colonisation could help ensure humanity's future can be traced back a couple of hundred years.
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The student's name? Jeffrey Preston Bezos. "The Earth is finite," he had told his high-school newspaper, "and if the world economy and population is to keep expanding, space is the only way to go." He would go on to amass an enormous fortune, which one day he'd start spending to kickstart that ambition.
He aspired to be a "space entrepreneur", and saw settlements beyond Earth as a way to ensure humanity's long-term future. Google's corporate headquarters is called the GooglePlex, an affectionately tongue-in-cheek reference to the origins of the company name.In the 1980s, there was a student in O'Neill's seminars at Princeton University, who took careful note of his professor's ideas. Larry liked it and the name "Google" stuck. Anderson miskeyed googol as "google" and found it available. In 1997, Larry was brainstorming names with other Stanford graduate students, including Sean Anderson, and looking at available domain names. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, named their search engine after the term googol. Frank Pilhofer has determined that, given Moore's law (which is that computer processor power doubles about every 1 to 2 years), it would make no sense to try to print out a googolplex for another 524 years - since all earlier attempts to print a googolplex out would be overtaken by the faster processor. Later, another mathematician devised the term googolplex for 10 to the power of googol - that is, 1 followed by 10 to the power of 100 zeros. Such a number, Milton apparently replied after a short thought, could only be called something as silly as a "googol." The term was invented by Milton Sirotta, the 9-year nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner, who had asked his nephew what he thought such a large number should be called. A googol is larger than the number of elementary particles in the universe, which amount to only 10 to the 80th power. A googol is 10 to the 100th power (which is 1 followed by 100 zeros).
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