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Interplanetary space contains just a few dozen particles in each cubic centimeter — in comparison, the air we breathe has tens of quintillions of molecules per cubic centimeter.

They expect future calculations to be performed on ORNL's Frontier, the world's most powerful supercomputer and the first exascale system, which is able to perform more than a quintillion calculations each second.

There are more than 10 quintillion insects on Earth, 200 million for every human.

"The right answer emerges every 10 minutes, and the rest of the data, quintillions of them, are computations that serve no further purpose and are therefore immediately discarded," de Vries says.

"All of these machines combined are generating 500 quintillion guesses every second of the day, non stop - that is 500 with 18 zeros behind it."