//------------------------------// // The Answer 40 // Story: Life is A Test 2: Test Harder (Quite A Bit Harder) // by Brony_of_Brody //------------------------------// Following logic, one can estimate the answer to be 18.4 quintillion. The tenth term, or 210, is 1024. That's roughly 1000, a nice round number. So if 1000 is roughly 210, then a thousand times itself six times is equal to 210 multiplied by itself six times, to make 260. 10006 is one quintillion. So 260 is approximately equal to a quintillion. The remaining 24 equals sixteen, so 264 is 260 x 24, equalling 16 quintillion. That's not bad, but we can definitely use a bit more logic to make this more precise. We approximated 210 as 1000. But 1024 is 2.4 percent bigger than 1000. So every time we multiplied by a thousand, we should have also added on the remaining 2.4%. Multiplying a thousand by itself six times means we should have added on six lots of 2.4%, to make about 15% total. So the answer is 16 quintillion plus an extra 15%. Luckily, it isn't difficult to work out 15% of 16 quintillion. Ten percent of it is 1.6 quintillion, so five percent of that is 0.8 quintillion, to make a total of 2.4 quintillion, which we add on to make 18.4 quintillion. BTW, the exact total is 18,446,744,073,709,551,616.