And my god, it’s full of stars. There’s endless detail in the universe, whether you zoom in, or zoom out.
See: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/NASA-HS2...
Our ability to track distinct objects is impressive by our own standard, and we're pretty good at understanding "big" numbers, say somewhere between a million and a billion. But in the scale of things, we're much closer to the hunter knowing his kill will feed his tribe for many moons versus being a starfaring race.
The entire universe probably contains around 10^80 protons, yet Google's founders casually referred to the number 10^100 to indicate their ambitions for information processing.
A carbon atom is 0.3 nm in diameter, so only about 3.3 million can fit in 1 mm. There are well over twice the number of people in NYC!
All in all, numbers that describe the natural world aren't all that impressive compared to the human world.
The entire visible universe that is. It could well be infinite and hence contain a larger number of them.
We can only see the light that has had time to reach us. Everything that is farther away than about a dozen billion lightyears is not visible.
Technically new stuff is always becoming visible to use, the visible universe expands naturally as new light reaches us.
Of course, the stuff is now farther away since the universe is expanding and at some point the expansion will likely overtake the speed of light and over some distance may have, which means beyond some distance we will never be able to see or know.
What is beyond the visible universe is quite unknown. We can't see it.
But you're comparing mere cardinality with combinations and permutations. We know the latter always produces huge numbers.
Sure, but about 70 quintillion of them fit in 1 mm^3.
When we stop and think about it, maybe. But try this experiment with a friend (or a few times with different friends): take a sheet of A4 or "letter" sized paper and a pencil, turn it in landscape orientation and mark the far left side of it with '0', and the far right side as '1B' telling them it's an even scale from zero to one billion, and ask them "without thinking about it just mark where a million would be." -- it's important to get a response from "the top of their head" to understand the difference between what we can recall, and what we habitually think. Most people are way off. If paper isn't handy use fingers and a large object you can touch - e.g. top edge of monitor or TV etc.
It would take light nearly 2.5hrs to travel that far.