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The week's question
In December 2024, in the thread "Re: BRK: Why Not XOM?", BreckHutHigh asked the members: "What about the long road trips with kids?" This week it is put to everyone again. The button below opens the small thread re-asking it - read what others have said so far, then give your own answer as an ordinary reply.
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Author: g0177325   😊 😞
Number: of 84362 
Subject: Re: Careful how you pray
Date: 06/07/26 9:32 AM
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We know there are several branches of Islam and Judaism, but they are not allowed for, so the list is inherently discriminatory for not recognizing those branches, the way it recognizes 21 different branches of Christianity.

I'd never even heard of the "Baha'i faith (BH)", but it seems respectable as religions go:

The Baháʼí Faith is a religion[a] established by Baháʼu'lláh in the 19th century that teaches the essential worth of all religions and the unity of all people.[b] It initially developed in Iran and parts of Western Asia, where it has faced ongoing persecution since its inception.[14] The religion has 7–8 million adherents, known as Baháʼís, who are spread throughout most of the world's countries and territories.[c]

Wikipedia: Baháʼí Faith - Wikipedia

I'm surprised Jainism isn't on the list. It's my favorite religion, mainly because of its long and detailed history of inventing systems of HUGE numbers and HUGE time spans. See

en.wikipedia.org - Jain cosmology
https://googology.fandom.com/wiki/Jaghanya_Par%C4%...

There's also a recent book that looks at the Jainian big numbers:

amazon.com: Huge Numbers: A Story of Counting Ambitiously, from 4 1/2 to Fish 7: Elwes, Richard: 9781541605923: Amazon.com: Books

Some Jain numbers are not defined directly, but via long-running processes. For instance, one palyopama or ‘pit year’ is characterised as follows: First a cubic pit is dug one yojana wide and the same depth, a yojana being a standard measure of length, often taken to be eight modern miles, although this may have varied. (For convenience we will take a lower figure of ten kilometres, around six miles.) Next, the pit is filled with newborn lambswool, and the clock is started. If one strand of hair is removed every century, then one palyopama is the length of time it takes to completely empty the pit.

How long is this? Leaving the true answer as a mystery, we can cook up a conservative underestimate by assuming that each strand of wool occupies at most one cubic millimetre—surely too generous, especially given the immense pressure at the bottom of the ten-kilometre-deep wool pit. If so, then the number of hairs in the pit exceeds the number of cubic millimetres in a cube ten kilometres wide, which is to say 10,000,0003 or 1021. We then multiply by 100 to account for the century-long breaks, taking us to 1023 or 100 sextillion years.

So much for the palyopama. But cosmic timescales are measured using longer units: the sagaropama (or ‘ocean year’) comprising 100 million palyopamas, which is therefore over 1031 (10 nonillion) solar years.

Now, the period immediately prior to ours (and somewhat happier) was 100 trillion sagaropamas long—in excess of 1041 years. The one before that was 200 trillion sagaropamas, preceded by one of 300 trillion sagaropamas, the whole cycle beginning with a period of 400 trillion sagaropamas.
...

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