TIL NASA calculated that you only need 40 digits of Pi to calculate the circumference of the observable universe, to the accuracy of 1 hydrogen atom
ripcord@kbin.social to 
Today I Learned@kbin.social – 2 points – jpl.nasa.gov
ripcord@kbin.social to Today I Learned@kbin.social – 2 points –
About 17 bytes of data. For reference a common size for numbers is 8 bytes. I imagine Nasa has hardware for efficiently handling larger numbers such as 16 bytes and possibly more.
I mean, so do you. Any common device can handle computation with numbers a lot larger than 8 bytes, using appropriate software. Hell, even Python can handle that pretty routinely.
Very large numbers are used routinely in cryptography.