Rounding to Zero

October 29, 2026 · 2 min read

Compared to infinity, every number of unimaginable size rounds to zero. This is true of a billion, a trillion, or 10 raised to the millionth power. Steven L. Peck’s horror novella A Short Stay in Hell plays with this concept. Its protagonist finds himself in hell, but a hell with an escape hatch. He is not destined for an eternity there. Hell is a library containing every possible book, and he may leave once he finds the one that tells the story of his life. His sentence is finite. It is merely unimaginably long.

Just because we can name a number or an idea does not mean we can grasp it. Richard Feynman tells a story about his father teaching him that being able to name a bird is worth very little. You can identify the species and still know nothing of its mating rituals, where it likes to build its nest or how it builds it, where and when it migrates, or how its males differ from its females. The bird remains unknown to you, largely inscrutable.

Similarly, the fact that mathematics gives us notation for a number like 95^1,312,000, the number of books in Peck’s library, does not mean we have any notion of what such a number represents. Written out, it would be a 1 followed by roughly 2.6 million zeros. It dwarfs every physically meaningful number in our observable universe. The number of electrons in the universe is estimated at roughly 10⁸⁰. If every one of those electrons were replaced with a copy of the universe itself, we would have 10⁸⁰ multiplied by 10⁸⁰, or 10¹⁶⁰ electrons. Compared to 95^1,312,000, that is still basically nothing.

In Sunday school, we talk about how this life is a blink of an eye compared to eternity. I suppose this is true, but it would be just as true if we lived to be 10 billion years old. Infinity is a conceptual black hole whose density ruptures the fabric of space and time. No comparison can give us a glimpse of the infinite. The idea defies understanding.

And yet our life, though an imperceptibly fleeting moment, carries cosmic weight. Measured by its length, mortality rounds to zero; measured by its consequences, it does not. I believe this life shapes our eternal destiny, and if a finite life can alter an infinite future, God must regard our mortal sojourn as infinitely valuable. By a crude mathematical analogy: infinity multiplied by any fraction, however small, is still infinity.

Sources

• Steven L. Peck, A Short Stay in Hell — https://www.indigo.ca/products/a-short-stay-in-hell
• Richard Feynman, What Do You Care What Other People Think? (the story of his father and the bird)

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