ELI5: Why is a googolplex unfathomable?

>Another thing, why would a googolplex of numbers if downloaded, fill up all of the hardrives in the world and yet here is the pdf download of the entire number written out.

Writing out a number and writing out that many numbers are two very different things. e.g. "100" only takes 3 characters to write, but writing 100 numbers takes much more room: "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21,......., 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100".

Also, that website doesn't actually need to store every volume from 1 to 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000, it can just generate the requested volume on the fly from a template by replacing the volume number with whatever was requested. Except for volume 1, which starts with a '1', the rest are all just full of zeros.

/r/explainlikeimfive Thread