While showing off No Man’s Sky at Gamescom this week, Hello Games co-founder Sean Murray took some time to explain the vastness of the procedurally-generated universe in the game.

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In the early days of development, the team was using a 32-bit number to generate all the planets in the universe. It seemed like plenty at the time, and as Sean told us, “with that 32-bit number it would take you four or five thousand years to see every planet if you spent only a second on each one.”However, the team wasn’t satisfied with that level of cosmic scale and wanted to go even further, partially in response to message board threads saying there’s no way No Man’s Sky universe can be truly infinite because all technology has a limitation. While technically correct, Sean let us know the team at Hello Games upped the ante and the No Man’s Sky universe is now being created using a 64-bit number.That’s two to the power of 64 planets, which Sean tells us would take about five billion years to explore if you spent one second on each; and that's with no bathroom breaks. Given that the Earth’s sun has about 4.6 billion years of fuel left before it flickers out and dies, that pretty much ensures no one will ever see every planet in No Man’s Sky. So yeah, not infinite, but really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really big. Even bigger than what you’re thinking right now. No, bigger.Although we didn’t see anything new from No Man’s Sky at Gamescom, Sean did leave us with a little tease, saying “we will have something big to show soon.”

Tal Blevins thinks No Man's Sky is going to be exactly what he thought the future would be like when he was nine; he looks forward to playing it for the next 5 billion years. Be sure to follow him on Twitter @talign